If you blinked, you may have missed it. The one-week-plus Lake Wenatchee sockeye season, that is.
At the time of this writing, the fishery was tentatively scheduled to end Friday. Or maybe sooner, depending on the recreational catch rate.
High success rates are a mixed blessing, of course, and a good harvest in the early days of the fishery — the first since 2004 — have contributed to its abbreviated length. Only as many salmon over the 23,000-fish spawning requirement as pass the Tumwater Dam on the Wenatchee River are allowed in the catch, and that number has approached quickly.
“Fishing has generally been pretty good,” said state fish manager Jeff Korth in the agency’s Ephrata office. “The average catch has been running better than three sockeye per boat, although on Sunday it slowed to 1.3 fish per boat. Limits have been the rule on the upper end of the lake, rather than the exception.”
Even biologist and fish expert Korth took a busman’s holiday and trekked to Lake Wenatchee for some sockeye action. Unfortunately, his party chose Sunday, which for some reason was an unusually down day, and landed a total of just two salmon.
Through the weekend, roughly 3,000 sockeye over the escapement goal had been counted, and the estimated harvest stood at about 1,700 fish. That probably left enough salmon to keep the fishery open through Friday, Korth said, but not enough to get past larger weekend crowds.
Just the opposite problem has plagued anglers at another popular salmon fishery — hatchery chinook in Marine Area 9 (Admiralty Inlet down to the Edmonds-Kingston line). Instead of hot early fishing and a short season, the much-anticipated fishery has been much slower than it was last summer. It closed Sunday so the numbers could be crunched, a surplus of fish was found and it was reopened by state salmon managers Tuesday and is now scheduled to end Friday night.
As with the Lake Wenatchee sockeye harvest, the local chinook catch is being monitored daily and the season could close before Friday.
Marine Area 10 (Seattle/Bremerton) also is open to selective chinook fishing, and since the catch rate there has been even slower than that in Area 9, it has remained open. The combined two-area chinook quota is 7,000 hatchery fish, and as of Sunday evening some 4,726 had been taken. Of those, 3,892 had been caught in Area 9.
Fishing in Area 9 apparently didn’t improve much during the one-day closure. All Star Charters owner/skipper Gary Krein said on Tuesday morning, “It was slim pickings last week, and it hasn’t picked up any this week.”
Krein was fishing off Shilshole Marina in Seattle, working on chinook bound for the south Sound, Lake Washington and Elliot Bay. Fishing there had been good for several days, Krein said, for fish from 10 pounds up to the high teens. A few decent resident coho also are being caught, he said.
Action on chinook has improved down at Buoy 10, on the bottom end of the Columbia River, but it’s still a little early for peak fishing. Some 165 anglers were checked by state personnel over the weekend, with eight chinook to 44 pounds. Chinook retention ends there on Aug. 31.
The Tulalip bubble improved a little last week and over the weekend, although with the Area 9 chinook fishery in full swing, there weren’t many anglers off Tulalip Bay. Creel checks at the Port of Everett ramp Saturday and Sunday showed 483 anglers with 20 chinook and 14 coho.
Fishermen in the San Juan Islands continue to hit kings, including some of the big boys off the west side of San Juan Island. Anthon Steen at Holiday Sports in Burlington said at least one 50-plus-pounder has been reliably reported taken there, and that the heavyweights should remain in the area through early fall.
Other productive spots in the islands include Secret Harbor and Indian Village for both jiggers and trollers, and Lopez Flats for those pulling flasher and green UV squid. Thatcher Pass produced a 32-pounder last week, Steen said.
Fishing has generally been pretty fair on the coast, with anglers last week averaging just over a fish per rod at Ilwaco, about 1.3 fish per rod at Westport, and a little under that farther up the coast. The split at Westport was about half chinook and half coho, and at Ilwaco, about three-quarters coho.
The Willapa Bay chinook fishery is showing signs of getting under way, although the kings being landed so far have been way out by the bar.
Anglers chasing kings on the upper Columbia are finding fish in the Brewster area and just above Wells Dam, according to Rod Hammons, a guide in Brewster. In the pool at the mouth of the Okanogan, Hammons said he’s been using dodger and herring in the morning, then switching to flasher/Super Bait once the sun is up.
Hammons said the area above Wells Dam, just above the fish ladder exit (where traveling chinook tend to hang for a while after climbing the ladder), is an easy spot to fish. It’s basically a trolling circle on the Chelan County side of the dam, using tuna-packed Super Bait.
Speaking of tuna, the coastal albacore season is in full swing. State coastal sampling coordinator Wendy Beeghley said tuna are being found even by a few of the larger private fishing boats, and that some charters are running 45 or 50 miles and landing 150 fish or more.
OUTDOOR WOMEN: Tomorrow is the registration deadline for the annual fall workshop produced by Washington Outdoor Women and the Washington Wildlife Federation. The popular event runs Sept. 12-14 at Camp River Ranch in Carnation, and offers 20 course choices ranging from Fly Fishing 101 through Outdoor Photography and Dutch Oven Cooking, to Basic Backpacking and Herbal First Aid. Interested women should go to www.washingtonoutdoorwomen.org or call Ronni McGlenn at 425-455-1986.
It’s a live-in experience, providing accommodation, meals and top-flight instruction for a fee of $225.
JUMBO CHINOOK: When Mission Beach resident Jim Scalf first saw the big king salmon roll, he thought to himself, “maybe I’ll finally get my 50-pounder, after fishing Rivers Inlet for 12 years.” A half-hour later, after six runs of 100 or 125 yards, his trophy was in the boat — 48 inches and 75 pounds of prime chinook.
“I thought, ‘I just caught a fish larger then my 6-year-old granddaughter,’” he said.
On the trip to Rivers Inlet, British Columbia, between July 31 and August 6, Scalf landed kings of 75, 34, 56 and 33 pounds. His party scored as follows: Dale Smith, 44, 48, 40 and 37 pounds; Ross Eddy, 34, 41, 40 and 38 pounds; and Dennis Hill, 45, 44, 43 and 50 pounds. Scalf was motor-mooching with plug-cut herring, about five miles down-inlet from the head, at a spot called Five Fingers, when the big fish hit.
Scalf said the owner of Dawson’s Landing Resort told him his 75-pounder might be the second-largest chinook ever taken from the inlet, behind a 811/2-pound fish caught in 1989. A truly huge chinook of 126 pounds was taken in a commercial net in 1986, and resort owners on the inlet claim carcasses have been found on tributary streams that would have broken the world hook and line record of 97 pounds, 4 ounces from Alaska’s Kenai River.
This has been an outstanding big-chinook year on the B.C. coast so far, with at least two 80-plus pounders taken, four or five in the 70s, and a double handful in the 60s.
CRAB TAX: At its Aug. 8-9 meeting in Lynnwood, the state Fish and Wildlife Commission took public comment on a proposed $10 penalty for Puget Sound recreational crabbers who fail to comply with state catch-reporting requirements.
The Fish and Wildlife Department claims it must have accurate catch data in order to manage effectively a finite resource under increasing demand. The proposed penalty has aroused, as you might imagine, howls of protest from the crabbing community.
The commission is scheduled to take action on the proposal at its Sept. 5-6 meeting in Olympia.
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