ENTIAT — Craig Eaton pushed his way through the cold, thigh-deep water, guiding a motley school of coho salmon through a concrete holding pen at the Entiat National Fish Hatchery.
Eaton and the other fish experts were cloaked in wetsuits, warm hats and gloves.
“It’s a lot warmer doing spring chinook,” said Eaton, manager of the hatchery, after climbing out of the tank filled with 49-degree water and pulling his jacket closed tight. “It’s pretty cold out here this time of year.”
The changing of the seasons wasn’t the only transition under way at the hatchery recently. The 65-year-old facility — built primarily to raise chinook salmon as mitigation for fish habitat cut off by the construction of Grand Coulee Dam — is switching fish.
The chinook salmon program that started in 1941 and had been operating continually since the early 1970s was phased out last spring. The first generation of coho was spawned at the hatchery on Nov. 13.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Yakama Nation are working together on the project as part of a larger effort to reintroduce coho in the upper Columbia River basin.
“We’re helping to recover a species that was extirpated from the river system way before construction of the dams,” Eaton said. Coho were once the second-most-abundant fish in the Columbia River system, but irrigation diversions and overharvesting wiped out the populations, according to the Yakama Nation fisheries program.
Partway through a review of all 21 of its hatcheries in the Columbia Basin, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided earlier this year to end the chinook program at the Entiat hatchery. The agency concluded that it was causing more harm than good.
There are no barriers in the river to corral all the returning hatchery fish, which means they could stay in the river to spawn and mix and compete with the natural runs, the report said. The natural runs are endangered and considered more hardy than those raised in hatcheries.
In addition, the fish released from the hatchery contribute little to sport fishing, since the lower 26 miles of the Entiat River have been closed to fishing since 1998.
The federal agency considered raising summer chinook or capturing natural spring chinook from the river and raising them in the hatchery to increase their chances of survival. But Eaton said the number of natural chinook in the river was too low to support that idea.
The agency decided on coho salmon after a bumper crop of them returned to local waters from the ocean this year. At least 15,000 have been counted so far at Rock Island Dam.
Eaton said he welcomes the change because it could one day lead to the return of fishing in the Entiat River.
Since coho return in the fall, there would be little danger of accidentally snagging a natural spring chinook or steelhead in the river this time of year, Eaton said. The chinooks have already spawned and steelhead are not yet coming up the river.
But fishing on the river, if it happens at all, is still years away, he said.
The coho salmon spawned at the Entiat hatchery were captured in the Wenatchee River. Their eggs will be incubated and the juveniles raised at the facility for about 18 months. During that time, the Fish and Wildlife Service will try to secure permits from NOAA-Fisheries to release those juveniles into the Entiat River.
If the permit is denied, the fish will be released into the Wenatchee River, Eaton said.
If the permit is approved and they are released into the Entiat River in the spring of 2009, the first run of coho should return to the hatchery in the fall of 2010, said Christa Strickwerda, a fisheries biologist for the Yakama Nation.
Federal agencies will determine at that time whether a fishing season would be permitted in the Entiat River.
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