HEAT HACKS FOR SUMMER RUN SALMON The salmon opener on the Columbia River is upon us and we have some deadly tips to help you land limits
beat the heat, so are the salmon. High water temperatures in the rivers make it a challenge to catch these fish who rely heavily on oxygen levels in the water, as well as water levels.
Photo: Jason Brooks
BY RANSFORD & MERZ
SHOP
By the time you’re reading this, it’ll be open season for sockeye and summer run chinook on the upper Columbia river. It’ll also be hot as hell, with temperatures maintaining 100 degrees for the foreseeable future. What happens, then, when it becomes too hot to fish? Well, raise your hand if you’ve scorched yourself on the water, bypassing the morning sunscreen lather just to get some rods in the water, then forgetting to apply it while waiting to catch our limits. And boom — sunburn. Too late now. We’ve all done it — get your hand up. Anyway, just as we are trying to
This year, temperatures on the Columbia are already within two degrees of the slaughter zone of 2015, when half the sockeye salmon run was lost because of high water temperatures. An estimated 250,000 sockeye died that year, long before reaching their spawning grounds. We talked about this in depth on our summer chinook preview episode of the We Are Outdoorsmen Podcast, but state biologists are also worried.
water temperatures “ High in the summer months
That’s, well, concerning. And with temperatures not expected to cool down any time soon, there’s an incredible risk of disease, mortality and a halt to their migration altogether. Enough with the bad news, though. The salmon are here, the season is open, so we’re going to target them. But each year of fishing has its own challenges. It always seems that a different color, rigging, bait, speed or location is something we have to take into consideration. Combine all of that with the high water temperatures and there’s no saying how exactly these fish will react. So, what can we do to catch them? The best answer is to spend time
make it a challenge to on the water and not be afraid to catch summer sockeye try different things. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Mack’s and chinook. LANCE MERZ | MACK’S LURE PRO STAFF
“We are crossing the line to temperatures that can be disastrous for fish,” said Michele DeHart, manager of the Fish Passage Center, which monitors and studies fish migration in the Columbia and Snake rivers. “I would say the outlook is pretty grim.”
Lure is the end-all, be-all of salmon products, but especially during challenging years like this, there’s a number of effective combinations in our product line that can really make the difference between an empty cooler and sunburn vs. a limit and loading up the boat before the burn. SHOP MACK’S LURE PRODUCTS
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