Landing Hanford Chinook Is A Science Last Untamed Stretch Of Columbia River Offers Hardy Adventure And Large Salmon

There’s science to catching the giant fall chinook salmon that run up to the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River.

The earth science of negotiating rough roads to undeveloped boat launches near Vernita Bridge without breaking an axle.

The physical science of getting lures to the right depth in unpredictable flows coming out of Priest Rapids Dam.

The chemical science of triggering a strike from salmon that lost their urge to eat a couple of hundred miles downstream.

Doug Pidduck, a fishing guide from Yakima, seemed to relish in the experiment as he cut three frozen herring for us to bait our hooks.

He anointed mine with WD-40. He left his plain. Then he applied a fish scent called Smelly Jelly to the bait on the end of Bill Mitchell’s line.

“Why are you putting scent on a herring?” I asked.

“To make it smell like a fish,” said Pidduck as we began dropping the downriggers

With the bow pointed upstream, Pidduck used a trolling motor to buck the current so our baits could creep downstream very slowly. He used his sonar to monitor depth and keep our downriggers just off the river-channel dropoff 40 feet below.

We’d been fishing more than a half an hour before the sun peaked through the clouds on the horizon. I missed the first strike on the WD-40 herring because I was gawking at a huge mule deer browsing along the shore near the Hanford B Reactor.

An hour later, the Smelly Jelly herring earned Mitchell the first fish - a 25-pounder that ran, rebelled and essentially trashed his reel’s drag system before Pidduck could nab it with a net.

Pidduck uses 20-pound line, which is heavier than many anglers use. “But every now and then we hook into a big sturgeon,” he said. “With 20-pound line, we have a chance of landing it.”

The salmon are big, too. According to Fish and Wildlife Department records, most of these salmon, known as upriver brights, range from 18 to 25 pounds. A good number of adults reach 40 pounds. Some reach 50 pounds. But every year, anglers catch a few muscled specimens larger than 60 pounds.

“I give my clients a list of the gear they need,” Pidduck said. “But the one thing they consistently fail to bring is a big enough cooler.”

Of the various tactics used by anglers who jam the Hanford Reach each fall, four stand out as most popular.

Drifting downstream trailing No. 5 or 6 Blue Fox or Vibrax spinners, using a weight if necessary.

Drifting and jigging dart-type jigs.

Backtrolling deep-diving plugs such as Magnum Wiggle Warts, sometimes with downriggers.

Using downriggers and backtrolling plug-cut herring.

Fishing for the chinooks picks up in mid-September as the water temperatures drop into the 60s. By late September, the water temperatures generally are near the ideal 60-degree range, and the kings are stacking up in the waters below Priest Rapids Dam.

The term upriver brights relates to their chrome-like condition when they enter the Columbia in preparation for their long upstream migration. The eating quality of these salmon remains remarkably decent considering they must travel nearly 400 miles in fresh water - including 172 miles of reservoirs - to reach Priest Rapids Dam.

But as the season wanes into late October, most of the adult fish caught are likely to be headed into smokers.

If the bite is on, an angler can keep two adult salmon plus up to four jacks (immature fish under 24 inches long).

Biologists earlier had forecast that 94,200 upriver brights would enter the mouth of the Columbia River this year.

The forecast was updated to 160,000 on Sept. 11. But the numbers were adjusted last week to 132,500.

That’s still considerably better than last year’s 106,000. However, the forecast is a shadow of the run in 1987, when 420,000 fall chinooks entered the Columbia, the largest run recorded since fish surveys were begun in 1964.

The salmon run a gauntlet of tribal gillnets and sport fisheries as they progress up the Columbia.

Some of the chinooks veer off to the Deschutes River, a few head to the Yakima. About 2,000 are headed for the endangered fall chinook spawning runs of the Snake River.

But about 40,000 adult kings should make it to the Priest Rapids area this fall. Using last year as a barometer, sport anglers will catch roughly 4,000 of them. That leaves plenty of salmon to spawn and perpetuate the natural run.

This is the last of the spectacular salmon runs that penetrate deep into the Columbia River system. Ironically, much of the credit for the keeping the run intact goes to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Security and secrecy involving plutonium production on the reservation has precluded development along the river for 40 years.

This 50-mile segment known as the Hanford Reach is the last free-flowing stretch of the mighty Columbia in the United States.

Free-flowing water makes a big difference to salmon.

“Although the fish are affected by the (four) dams on the lower Columbia, they at least have a good spawning area above McNary Dam,” said Joe Hymer, Washington Fish and Wildlife Department biologist in Battleground.

On the other hand, the 2,000 fallrun chinooks bound for the Snake River still have four additional dams and non-flowing pools to negotiate. Only about 600 will survive to cross Lower Granite Dam, down from an average of 41,000 that swam upstream past Lewiston and Clarkston in the late 1950s.

Then the chinooks will butt up against the barrier at Hells Canyon Dam, which blocks the salmon from 247 miles of traditional spawning areas.

In all, the Snake River salmon have lost more than 50 percent of their native spawning grounds, Hymer said.

But life remains good on the Hanford Reach.

Mitchell was reaping the fruits of a free-flowing stream by 10:30 a.m.

He stood in the boat with his mouth agape over the monster he’d just landed in a circus performance that demanded help from everyone aboard the boat.

“That’s bigger than the 44-pounder I caught on the Kenai River in the spring,” Mitchell said.

He hesitated and added, “And we didn’t have to pay any $2,500 to catch it either.”

As of last Friday, the 45-inch-long fish was the largest recorded by Washington Fish and Wildlife Department check stations for this year’s run. The fish weighed 50 pounds.

But there’s more to come.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo