Oregon aims at developing new Spring Chinook fishery!
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.Click here to read more…