Hi everyone.
Fishing for Chinook Salmon will continue on the Little Salmon River this weekend (Thursday through Sunday), and the South Fork Salmon River fishery opens this Thursday, June 19. If you haven’t been out yet, now is the time! Read on below for more detailed information about these fisheries.
Little Salmon River Fishery Update
I’m going to start out this update with some relatively bad news – Rapid River harvest share has decreased based on the most recent data. As most of you know, we estimate harvest share for our fisheries in a few different ways. Early in the season we estimate harvest shares based on PIT tagged fish coming over the dams. This gives us our first look at how many adults are expected to return to the various fisheries in the state. In recent years, we’ve been using genetic data collected at Lower Granite Dam during the run to adjust harvest share estimates – as this is the best available data. This has often resulted in an increase to our harvest share which it did again this year. Unfortunately, the most recent genetic analysis we conducted this week has reduced our harvest share by about 370 adults, resulting in a Rapid River harvest share of 1,572 (still substantially better than the 900 adults based solely on PIT tags). The Lower Salmon River fishery closed on June 8, with a final estimate of 1,088 adults harvested, which means we’re targeting a season total of 484 adults on the Little Salmon River this year.
Chinook Salmon fishing on the Little Salmon River was a little slower than expected over the past 4-day fishing interval (Thursday through Sunday), and we estimated 147 adults were harvested (Table 1). That puts our season total up to 370 adults harvested in the Little Salmon River, so we’ve still got about 114 adults to go before our harvest share is reached. The Little Salmon River will remain open 4 days per week (Thursday through Sunday) with a 1 adult per day limit for at least one more fishing interval. I’ll provide another update next week so stay tuned.