Sockeye make splash in Columbia
It’s a good-news year for sockeye salmon, including a modern record run up the Columbia and Wednesday’s opening of a rare Lake Wenatchee sockeye season, plus good numbers of sockeyes heading to Idaho headwaters.
The Lake Wenatchee fishery is prized by anglers who had been waiting word on the season since a large sockeye run was predicted in July.
The last years enough fish moved upstream to allow the season were 2004 and 2001.
The season will end when biologists determine they have caught the surplus beyond what is needed for spawning.
Anglers can keep two adult sockeye a day.
Fishing is being allowed only from one hour before sunrise to one hour after sunset.
A surge of anglers likely will create some headaches considering the dearth of public access on Lake Wenatchee, Korth warned.
Lake Wenatchee State Park has a boat launch, and a small, primitive launch is available on U.S. Forest Service property, but parking is quite limited at both spots.
Meanwhile, this summer’s Lake Washington sockeye numbers could be the worst in 37 years.
Fish mangers say it’s still a mystery why the lake’s sockeye run hasn’t materialized along with the highest returns for the Columbia River sockeye run since 1955 — more than 21,500.
Although they all migrate to the same ocean pasture near Kodiak, Alaska, fisheries officials speculate the Columbia sockeye may be getting a boost this year from increased water flows that ushered young fish out of the river systems four years ago plus a hatchery fry program in mid-British Columbia.
River flows that are higher and cooler than they’ve been in 10 years are beckoning the Idaho component of the Columbia run on their long journey to their headwaters spawning areas.
About 100 sockeye salmon have already made the nearly 900-mile trip from the Pacific Ocean, through eight dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers and finally to the Sawtooth Valley.
Tens of thousands of spawning fish gave Redfish Lake its name, until miners blocked their migration in 1910 with Sunbeam Dam on the Salmon River east of Stanley. Sportsmen blew up the dam in 1931, and the sockeye returned, with numbers peaking at 4,360 in 1955.
This year is the largest sockeye return recorded at Lower Granite Dam since it was built in the Snake River in 1975, and nearly 25 times the average return of the last 10 years.
Ten years ago two sockeye came back.
The Snake River sockeye was the first population to be listed as endangered on the Columbia system 17 years ago.