FISHING
More Than Just A Chinook Show Coho are coming on strong in Mid-Columbia fall salmon fisheries, and this should be a good month to catch them and late upriver brights. By Jeff Holmes
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ometimes it seems like no matter what they do, state salmon managers can’t catch a break from the angling community. The 2022 salmon bounty on the Columbia River is a classic example of this. No matter how knowledgeable or ignorant an angler is, he or she (usually he) thinks he or she knows better and that the biologists who control our seasons and make predictions are bumbling fools. Usually it’s the other way around, but truth be told, there are some salmon managers and also political decisions and pressures from on high in Olympia, Salem, and Washington DC that are super stupid. Similarly, federal laws our state managers must follow draw plenty of fire from anglers who think it’s merely the ignorance of biologists that lead to fisheries restrictions. Take the almost-two-week closure of the Lower Columbia last month as a great example of this. It was entirely driven by state managers observing federal laws. Most of our salmon managers are anglers and good people, and it’s sometimes painful to watch them take constant crap on social media, at boat launches
Salmon fishing is far from done on the MidColumbia. Coho join in on the fall Chinook fun in waters that stretch from Drano Lake past the Deschutes and Umatilla Rivers to the Hanford Reach and into the Snake as far as Hells Canyon. Here, Chad Dawson fights a salmon at the Klickitat River mouth on an October day that would serve up limits of silvers and kings for a guided crew. (JERRY HAN)
and in sporting goods stores from folks who are typically well removed from the realities of navigating complicated federal and state laws, court decisions and lawsuit threats, highly altered ecosystems, largely unchecked guiding and increasingly lethal and numerous sport anglers.
All of these factors and many more make managing and predicting fish runs harder than ever. I for one am super pleased that managers “screwed up” and completely misforecast salmon runs in 2022 and that way more spring, summer and fall Chinook nwsportsmanmag.com | OCTOBER 2022
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