Ocean salmon seasons set

Anglers are getting plenty of encouragement for planning summer salmon fishing trips to the Washington coast.

The fishing will kick off earlier than in recent years with a June 12-30 season for hatchery chinook off Ilwaco, Westport, La Push and Neah Bay.

General salmon fishing will open July 1 at Neah Bay and La Push and July 4 out of Westport.

The 2010 ocean salmon seasons recently approved by the Pacific Fishery Management Council give anglers plenty of leeway to hook their share of roughly 653,000 fall chinook forecast to return to the Columbia River this fall.

That would exceed the 2009 returns by 234,000 chinook.

The strong forecast includes an expected big return to Spring Creek National Fish Hatchery and other Columbia hatcheries, which are the backbone of the ocean sport chinook fishery.

The summer seasons follow what already is shaping up to be an excellent season for spring chinook up the Columbia and Snake rivers.

The number of chinook heading upstream past Bonneville Dam last week was “the highest cumulative count to date since 2003,” said Joe Hymer, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife salmon expert in Vancouver.

While it’s still too early to say for sure whether the run will continue as forecast to be the largest run since 1938, some biologists say they’re convinced.

But this much is for certain, Hymer says:

•Lower Columbia anglers caught 29,125 chinook and released 4,370 more in 166,027 angler trips in a fishing season that ended last Sunday. That eclipses the record 25,100 kept fish in 2001.

•Angler effort in the lower Columbia for the beginning of the 2010 spring chinook season has been the highest since 2002.

•An April 17 aerial survey on the Columbia upstream from the mouth of the river at Buoy 10 to Bonneville Dam counted 2,585 boats and 1,393 bank anglers. Nearly half of the boats were in the 16 miles upstream from the Interstate 5 bridge.

Ocean fishing should be just as exciting, biologists say.

Because of efforts to fin-clip and mark hatchery salmon before release, the June 12 season will be Washington’s first selective fishery for hatchery chinook in the ocean, said Phil Anderson, Fish and Wildlife Department director.

The season will be more important to areas from Westport north that it will be at Ilwaco, which will be focused on the estuary sturgeon season scheduled to be open May 22-June 26.

While the numbers are good for this year’s chinook returns, the predictions are not so good for coho salmon.

Angling off northern Oregon and southern Washington will open July 1 with a coho quota of just 33,600. That compares to 88,200 in 2009 and 10,180 in 2008.

The Columbia River coho forecast for 2010 is 389,500, compared to last year’s huge return of more than 1 million.

The season for both coho and chinook opens July 1. Anglers will be allowed to keep clipped or unclipped chinook in that season, but all coho must be marked with a missing adipose fin.

Currently, Westport charter boats are heading out daily for bottom fish, such as rockfish and ling cod.

Halibut opens next Sunday and runs on limited days into June.

Albacore tuna fishing will start in mid-July and run through early October.

On the Web: Westport-Grayland Chamber of Commerce at (800) 345-6223; charterwestport.com