Hanging up his waders: Idaho’s Clearwater region fish manager retiring this month
Joe DuPont did not know jobs like his existed when he was an undergraduate at the University of Idaho.
He aspired to be a medical doctor or veterinarian.
“I had no intentions of being a biologist. I don’t think I knew what one was,” he said. “I thought Fish and Game was game wardens.”
On a whim, he applied for a Fish and Game gig at a UI job fair and promptly forgot about it. A few weeks later, he was offered and accepted a job running creel surveys in the Sawtooth Valley.
“Over a span of three years, I recognized that I didn’t have a lot of empathy for cats or yappy dogs, so (being a vet) probably wasn’t in my future,” he said. “If I was going to be a doctor, I wanted to be a surgeon and started thinking, ‘Man, that is a lot of years from now but I’m really liking what I’m doing now.’ ”
He headed back to UI for graduate school and later took jobs with Avista and the Idaho Department of Lands before returning to Fish and Game.
In 2008, he became the fisheries manager for the Clearwater Region and later this month will retire after 18 years guiding some of the state’s most popular and diverse fisheries. The region is renowned for its salmon and steelhead fishing. The Hells Canyon stretch of the Snake River is home to massive white sturgeon, one of the most iconic species in the Columbia River Basin. Tributaries to the Clearwater River that pour out of the Bitterroot Mountains provide blue ribbon westslope cutthroat trout fishing. Dworshak Reservoir boasts kokanee and record-challenging smallmouth bass, and the region has a series of small lakes, ponds and reservoirs cherished for trout, bass, bluegills and more.
DuPont, who grew up near Moscow, had fished for many of those species as a kid and college student.
“I never really had any intentions to come back and manage the same water I fished as a kid,” he said. “But it’s cool to be able to think about, ‘Oh yeah, I was doing this as a kid and think about how things have changed.’ ”
Communication
Early in his stint as the Clearwater fisheries manager, DuPont generated some angst from the public over the fickleness of spring chinook fisheries. People love to fish for the hard-fighting salmon.
“They’re here for a short period of time. They’re big and they taste great. So the combination of those three things – when they are here, man, people, they’re as passionate as you can get,” DuPont said.
But the runs are often small and seasons can sometimes end abruptly, causing frustration among anglers.
“My first two years as a fisheries manager, I was very green and probably didn’t know a lot about what the public wanted and I got a lot of hate mail, more than I do now,” he said. “It got to the point where I was like, ‘All right, I need to understand what they want and I need to keep them informed about why we are doing what we are doing.’ ”
He started a weekly spring chinook fishery email and, at the same time, worked with the public to develop a harvest matrix that frames season options like daily bag limits and how many days per week will be open to fishing based on run strength.
The newsletter was an instant hit. He got comments like, “This is the best thing Fish and Game ever did” and “It’s about time Fish and Game started communicating with us,” he said. “That is when it really hit me that just, ‘My God, they want this information; this is important to them. They want to be kept in the loop, they want to be part of the process.’ ”
The email list grew from about 200 people the first year to about 2,000. In addition, the updates are posted to the Fish and Game website as blog posts. They appear weekly during the spring chinook season, but DuPont also writes about other fisheries such as kokanee fishing at Dworshak Reservoir, steelhead forecasts, and interesting research by him and his colleagues.
The harvest matrix was an attempt to satisfy as many people as possible and to make the department and the commission’s season-setting decisions more transparent. Through public meetings and surveys, DuPont said the department learned that people prefer longer seasons even if it means smaller bag limits or fishing limited to four days per week.
“So, we’ve structured our fisheries now to try to extend the seasons as long as we can while still providing good opportunity,” he said.
Steelhead overhaul
Under his watch and with the help of a workgroup, the state changed the structure of the steelhead fishery on the Clearwater River. For decades, most of the Clearwater was open to catch-and-release steelhead fishing from July 1 to Oct. 14. The harvest season opened on Oct. 15.
But complications developed. Fall chinook became more abundant, which threatened to change the more laid-back feel of the catch-and-release season when effort is not as intense.
The Oct. 15 start of the season made for good fishing for a week or two. But fishing often slowed by mid November as many of the hatchery steelhead are harvested.
DuPont convened a working group made up of anglers from different factions and asked them to hammer out a different structure to the season.
“We’ve had other working groups but this was the first time we had a working group that their goal was to develop a proposal for fall chinook and steelhead.”
The group came up with a menu of two alternatives. One was pretty similar to the old structure. The second was a pretty radical shakeup. The harvest season would open Sept. 10 and then switch to catch-and-release on Oct. 15 and back to harvest on Nov. 9.
The department shared the two alternatives with the public and ultimately recommended the radical shift that was adopted by the commission. It has proved to be popular with many anglers.
The earlier start allows people to harvest A-run fish that visit the Clearwater before leaving for other destinations. They also have a chance to catch and keep early arriving B-run steelhead, fall chinook and coho.
The switch to catch-and-release retains the lower-effort steelhead fishing popular with fly anglers and others. It also allows B-run steelhead to pile up and become distributed up and down the river before harvest season reopens, solving the problem of a hot start to the harvest season followed by a crash in catch rates.
A new fishing hole
When DuPont took the job, Deyo Reservoir near Weippe was nothing more than an idea. It had some momentum but had not progressed much and people were wondering if it would happen. He worked with a group of people from Weippe and they decided to apply for a grant.
They got it and matching money.
“Now, there’s a beautiful reservoir that will be there for 100 years or more. The campground is full all summer long. To see that kind of project to fruition is pretty amazing,” he said.
DuPont names sturgeon as his favorite fish and has made monitoring, managing and researching the Hells Canyon population a key focus during his time in the Clearwater Region. That work includes pioneering novel ways to help the population that is in decline.
“Since I’ve been here, we’ve gone through a variety of studies, trying to understand this population to make sure that we’re doing whatever we can to make sure it’s healthy and persistent,” he said. “The work we do, not only is it fun, but it’s fascinating. And it’s meaningful and I’m still trying to spread the word to the day I leave because I think this population is going to face some significant challenges.”