05-01-2009, 07:48 PM
Well I have alot of guys (who don't have internet access) asking me at this stage of the run, how many fish are crossing Bonneville each day, and how many total have crossed it. Well, those numbers don't really serve alot of purpose unless we have an idea of how many of them we Idaho anglers are really going to get a shot at after they have made it through the gauntlet.
So when we see that 22,015 Chinook have crossed Bonneville to date, that seems like alot of salmon. But the total passage @ Lower Granite is only going to be about 28% of the Bonneville passage. The bottom line is that we lose alot of fish along the way (plus a good share are destined for other tribs between Bonneville and LG). I'm not really sure what to attribute that loss to, whether it be tribal, commercial, or sport fishing (I don't beleive there has been commercial fishing through the dam stretches for the last several years). But I have heard from multiple sources who have witnessed the Lower Columbia/Lower Snake this time of year say that the only way a salmon or steelhead can make it up through all the gillnets in that stretch is swimming right underneath the barges.
That 28% figure though is really only good for using the total passage @ Bonneville to predict the total passage @ LG. So it's nothing to really get too discouraged about (unless you use it to calculate what kind of passage we would need at Bonneville to meet the 128,000 and change that was forecast for LG this year)
A better figure to estimate the fish lost along the way is the 72% figure that I mentioned above. What that is saying is that last year, 28% of the fish destined for the Little Salmon River, that crossed Bonneville dam, either got lost, harvested, or otherwise killed before they made it to Lower Granite.
If very much of that can be attributed to tribal or sport fishing, then I have a bone to pick. The Idaho F & G closely moniters downriver fishing (and usually pre-emptively closes the Lower Salmon) to protect endangered upriver runs. I can only imagine how many different runs and subspecies of salmon and steelhead (endangered wild, as well as hatchery) are mixed in, in the Lower Snake and Lower Columbia. With that in mind, in my opinion, there shouldn't be any fishing whatsoever in those stretches, because there is no way of telling where a fish caught down there is headed.
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So when we see that 22,015 Chinook have crossed Bonneville to date, that seems like alot of salmon. But the total passage @ Lower Granite is only going to be about 28% of the Bonneville passage. The bottom line is that we lose alot of fish along the way (plus a good share are destined for other tribs between Bonneville and LG). I'm not really sure what to attribute that loss to, whether it be tribal, commercial, or sport fishing (I don't beleive there has been commercial fishing through the dam stretches for the last several years). But I have heard from multiple sources who have witnessed the Lower Columbia/Lower Snake this time of year say that the only way a salmon or steelhead can make it up through all the gillnets in that stretch is swimming right underneath the barges.
That 28% figure though is really only good for using the total passage @ Bonneville to predict the total passage @ LG. So it's nothing to really get too discouraged about (unless you use it to calculate what kind of passage we would need at Bonneville to meet the 128,000 and change that was forecast for LG this year)
A better figure to estimate the fish lost along the way is the 72% figure that I mentioned above. What that is saying is that last year, 28% of the fish destined for the Little Salmon River, that crossed Bonneville dam, either got lost, harvested, or otherwise killed before they made it to Lower Granite.
If very much of that can be attributed to tribal or sport fishing, then I have a bone to pick. The Idaho F & G closely moniters downriver fishing (and usually pre-emptively closes the Lower Salmon) to protect endangered upriver runs. I can only imagine how many different runs and subspecies of salmon and steelhead (endangered wild, as well as hatchery) are mixed in, in the Lower Snake and Lower Columbia. With that in mind, in my opinion, there shouldn't be any fishing whatsoever in those stretches, because there is no way of telling where a fish caught down there is headed.
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