Imagine a springer going airborne through the trees! :)
While California’s Department of Fish & Game seems to largely have given up on providing opportunities for the state’s hunter’s and anglers, our much more progressive neighbors to the North continue to do things to make people want to buy fishing and hunting licenses…
This time, the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife is trying to develop a new springer fishery on the Coast Fork Willamette River, which is a dandy-looking little stream that I always drool over when I drive up I-5.
The department plans on March 12 to release about 210,000 chinook salmon smolts into several reaches of the Coast Fork Willamette downstream of Dorena and Cottage Grove reservoirs to the river’s confluence with the Middle Fork Willamette in Springfield, in hopes of establishing a recreational fishery between Cottage Grove and Springfield. If this initiative is successful, anglers could be pulling adult hatchery spring salmon out of the Coast Fork Willamette when the fish return as adults in 2014.
“We hope to create a little more intimate and dispersed salmon fishery,” said Jeff Ziller, fish biologist for ODFW’s South Willamette Watershed District. “The Coast Fork is not a giant river but it runs enough water in the springtime to provide the structure for a good spring chinook fishery.” He said this year’s release could produce returns of 1,000 to 2,000 chinook, which could develop “a pretty nice fishery.”
The 6-inch smolts are currently being reared at ODFW’s McKenzie Fish Hatchery. They are part of a crop of about 1.2 million spring chinook the hatchery produced for release last fall and this late winter. The vast majority of these smolts – one million of them – will be released into the McKenzie River, which is currently one of the largest salmon fisheries in the upper Willamette Basin. Last year more than 6,000 hatchery spring chinook returned to the McKenzie. Many of these fish bypassed the hatchery and spawned in the McKenzie River, impacting the McKenzie’s wild chinook, which are listed for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The Upper Willamette River Salmon and Steelhead Conservation and Recovery Plan limits the number of hatchery fish that are allowed to stray onto wild salmon spawning grounds in the McKenzie River. ODFW’s reallocation of 210,000 smolts from the McKenzie to the Coast Fork is part of a comprehensive effort to reduce the number of hatchery salmon spawning in the McKenzie River.
“We will continue to release a lot of fish into the McKenzie but we hope to release enough into the Coast Fork to establish a fishery,” said Ziller, who noted that one of the issues for anglers on the McKenzie is overcrowding. “We think there will be a lot of benefits from this program as the impact on the number of harvestable fish in the McKenzie will be minimal and we may create additional opportunity for a dispersed chinook fishery in the Coast Fork.”
Lee says
Please don’t move up here to Oregon for the fishing, as it is not as good as you think it is. I moved quite a few years ago. The fishing was great then, but has since gone bad. Far too many biologists that think they know what they are doing. Actually they have good jobs and they want to continue to draw a paycheck while taking the resource down. Many people have stopped buying fishing liscences and have quit fishing.
jay k says
Hey, I talked to CDFG Warden recently and he didn’t know what a Coho Salmon is but he knew I had to have my license # hand written on my steelhead card. That guy deserves to get kicked by a horse if he hasn’t already!!.thank God I am Oregonian!! I have family and friends in that stretch of river hope to check out the new springer fishery oneday
Dmitry says
All the more reason to move…
tom says
JD,
It would be a ‘kick in the a$$’ playing a springer in those limited spaces….good luck getting it to hand.
You are absolutely right about the California DFG…it’s turned into another ‘do nothing’ government bureaucracy. You know, you can’t even get a current count of hatchery returning steelhead…the most recent posting is from January 14th. That my friend is inexcusable….the DFG is another government agency of political appointments that have no idea what the fish and game in California need to thrive or rebound…not only that, the appointed really have no business of being there….the wadens in the field, just doing the job they get paid to, suffer the rath of frustration from angler and hunter alike, due to the mis-management of the agency, and the resource it’s there to protect. California is on the cutting edge of technology, but is no doubt light years behind other western states relative to managing fish and game resources.