Northwest Fishing Reports

I just read the latest dam breaching study on the Snake River. I can not believe the insanity I am reading. I have looked for weeks for a place to ask the question and have found none. So, I'll ask here. What the heck is going on here and why does everyone lie about it or just ignore the elephant in the room.

In 2015, there were several days of 60,000+ salmon coming over Bonneville dam. The numbers were phenominal across the drainage. While fishing @ Lower Granite, we were told that the salmon runs were going to crash because DFW decided to allow 10,000,000 smolts to be flushed through the dam rather than being trucked/ferried around the dams to below Bonneville. This was from the fish biologists that would ocasionally stop by to talk to the fishermen. These were not the normal fish counters you would see sometimes @ Lower Granite. There were also no flash bang and whizzer shooters before 2015 that we ever saw.
2016, fishing wasn't quite as good, but the numbers were a little bit down from 2015. Not a big deal though.
2017, pretty much like 2016, but the reported numbers were substantially down. Started seeing the whiz bangers all over the place. Lower Granite closed for springers and the rotating days for fishing started.
2018, Massive reduction of returning fish. Seasons on again/ off again closing of fishing @ Lower Granite, supposedly due to lack of participation. Of course, when Garco closed the entire north side of the river @LG for a batch plant, and the fish counters wouldn't show up until after 5pm, of course there was no participation. Everyone had aleady gone home. Water dumping during daylight hours that altered the fish counts, whiz bangers that did absolutely nothing and fish counts dropping like a stone.
2019, What a mess. No fish, closed seasons, Springers open for a week, etc etc.

We were told that global warming was to blame, just as it is to blame for EVERYTHING. Then it was the Orcas. Didn't know Orcas were in the Snake River. It was the seals etc.
However, if you will just look at the FPC numbers just for 2019, because the earlier years are harder to get, you will see something totally different.

As of 2 Dec 2019 Fish Passage Center numbers. (Fall Chinook Numbers)
275,000 + over Bonneville
128,000 + over McNary
26,000 over Priest Rapids
17,200 over Ice Harbor

No counts below Bonneville, so no telling how many fish actually entered the drainage or how many fish were taken by those who knew the messed up seasons and what effect they had on fishing above Bonneville. Regardless, over half the 275,000 run over Bonneville were taken between Bonneville and McNary. Of the 128,000 left, (the amount crossing McNary) 26,000 got to Priest, 17,000 got to Ice Harbor. This allowed for a nearly non existant season on the Snake. You mean to tell me that 85,000 fish were caught above McNary to Priest Rapids and the Snake has a problem? Seems that the hatcheries above Priest rapids did a better job than the hatcheries on the Snake system.

Those 10,000,000 smolts from 2015 return between 2018-2019. It is said that approx 15% of smolts going through a dam die. 8 dams to go through will be 8 times the decreasing percentage of fish available to be killed or approx 93.7% of the initial 10M smolt down run to the sea. These are the fish to return in 2018-2019

The way I read it, 258,000 fish were taken, eaten, disappeared on the Columbia above Bonneville in 2019. 17,000 made it into the Snake river. Unless my math is bad, which it very well may be, 6.181% of the return went to the Snake River. All the rest were dispatched on the Columbia; one way or another. But only the Snake dams are at issue. If the fish don't get there, what would breaching the dams do and how come everything was hunky dory until 2017. How many orcas will die, seals will go elsewhere, or global warming will receed when the dams are breached? If the slack water temps are to blame, why were they not to blame in 2015?

So basically, We had an ever increasing fish run from the 1990's through 2015-16. Then all of a sudden, all the homeless seals on the west coast ended up in the Columbia river, the orca pods moved into the Columbia river, and Global warming killed the population. All this is going to be fixed by breaching the Snake river dams and the salmon will automatically return to the millions we had before the dams? Am I missing something? Please, somebody help me out here.

I have one other question. If all salmon who are allowed to reproduce are wild, and a % of the smolts are to have their adipose removed and become fishable, and those fish are biologically indistinguishable from fin intact fish and come from the same parents, how come the only fish counted for successful recoveries are wild fish. Are wild fish diverted around the hatcheries or are adipose deficient fish allowed to breed and become tomorrows wild fish? Sure seems that one could sure jack the numbers pretty easily to achieve the desired outcomes. You could cut off more fins to show less wild recovery, or cut off less to show more recovery. Either way, they are all the same fish! Just a thought.

And we haven't even started on the Steelhead yet.

If we’re serious about sustained salmon/steelhead recovery breaching dams has to be an option discussed. I’m no expert or even a biologist but I can’t help but believe completely changing the hydrology of the Snake and Big C has had a disastrous impact on salmon and steelhead. Still calling them rivers is pretty generous they’re so heavily dammed. They’re really a series of connected man made lakes with a little current and completely unnatural.

Dams are not the only culprit but they’re a big one so it’s only rational and logical in my opinion to discuss breaching them. I don’t have much hope for it though, huge amount of obstacles to overcome before a major dam is breached.

Breaching the small and useless Elwha dam wasn’t even easy and it should have been. Salmon / steelhead have already begun repopulating it. Such amazing creatures if we just give them a chance.

Ocean harvest and conditions obviously can’t be ignored either. The laundry list of things we need to do to help salmon/steelhead is long.

While I appreciate your position, if the dams were the reason for the salmon decline, why were the salmon counts continuing to increase from the mid 90's through 2015. The dam issue seems to be more of a political imparative. I don't believe that Elwah had a fish ladder system. The data do not support the Snake river dams as the culprit. If fry born in the Idaho tributaries, Toucannon, and Grand Ronde drainages can not GET to the ocean, they will not return to them. In the mid 2010's, salmon were returning to the Snake in droves. The dams had not changed.

93% of the 2019 run was consumed on the Columbia. <7% of the run got to Ice Harbor dam. Nearly all of those got to Lower Granite. Fish passage on the Snake doesn't appear to be the issue, fore bay and tailwater temps were lower in 2019 than any in the last 5 years, and yet, as is the case, predictions were far better until the start of the season when all the licenses and endorsements were sold and then......shutdown.

Whether one is in favor of dam breaching or not, the point I am attempting to make here is that the justifications for breaching just don't seem to hold water (no pun intended) based on historical data. As far as the difficulty of breaching Elwah, to many of us, it is the camel's nose under the tent. If you allow one dam to be breached, regardless of what the reasoning is, once it is acceptable, you just change the location to another and apply the same parameters to the next target. However, breaching Elwah has no bearing on the situation on the Snake river. But it was immediately brought into this discussion as though the two situations were the same because they were the same objects. They were both dams weren't they. It is that very situational equivelency that allow people to think that all rifles that LOOK like an assault weapon, must by necessity BE an assault weapon. Destroying several billion dollars worth of dams that can never be replaced, based on data that can not be verified, for reasons that are spurious and nebulous at best, and may be flat out bogus at worst, can only be driven by political considerations. Why is it that if Melania Trump has a tat on her butt, I could find a thousand pictures of it on the internet? Try finding an article on Google presenting a divergent view to dam breaching. It wasn't orca's that ate the salmon that crossed Bonneville. It wasn't the seals that ate the salmon that crossed Bonneville. Global warming didn't reverse the record salmon returns in 4 years. Sounds good on paper, but the rhetoric doesn't match the data.

Every fish that migrates into the Snake drainage, was born in the Snake drainage. If the point is to take out the Snake dams, simply stop the smolt runs FROM the Snake. The salmon runs TO the Snake will die by necessity because of the former, not because of the latter.

If only 6% are allowed to get TO the Snake, there is more to this than meets the eye. This whole situation is happening because someone WANTS it to happen. Fish and game ALLOWED 93% of the available fish to be taken. They were not taken on the Snake. They were taken before the got there. Why? Never any talk about Grand Coolie, Chief Joseph, Wells or Priest River or any other dams on the Columbia being breached. Just the Snake. There are some inconveient truths here. I am simply asking the questions.

Runs have fluctuated pretty widely since the 90s with some years being even worse than this year, they have not constantly improved.
The “record” years in 2014 & 2015 are still pitiful compared against the historic abundance of the Columbia and Snake systems. The dams have done so much sustained damage they’ve reset expectations very low for what a “good” run is.
The dams have damaged so much spawning ground there wasn’t enough for the 2014 return to even use. Wild kings were spawning on top of each other and damaging their own redds in the Hanford reach.
Respectfully, I don’t understand your Snake smolt argument or where you’re getting your numbers. Kings breed throughout the system and the numbers naturally fall the further up the rivers you go. Not all successfully navigate the fish ladders either and die below the dams having not successfully spawned.
Salmon and steelhead are amazingly adaptive but we’ve thrown too much at them too fast in these systems. Dams being the major factor in that. They have to be addressed if we’re serious about sustainable salmon/steelhead management.
The reduction in genetic diversity dams directly contributed to can never be recovered now but we don’t have to continue making it worse.
Breaching a few dams could help with all of this but won’t solve all the problems salmon/steelhead now face unfortunately.
Dams are being targeted because it’s entirely logical from a salmon / steelhead recovery perspective. Dams are not good for migratory fish, that should be pretty self evident. Advocates against breaching usually have an economic interest tied to the power, irrigation or navigation the dams provide. I respect those concerns, they’re very real but we’re going to have to make choices on what we value more. It’s becoming clear we can’t have it all.

Also curious what impact shad are having. Oddly they’re the one migratory fish thriving and it could be because of the dams not in spite of them though. There’s not a lot of research I could find. Never fished for them before may have to go get some this year and help out the cause. Can’t imagine their presence in such large numbers are helpful to salmon / steelhead.
Also seems like the sealions should be gorging themselves on them and helping out but again can’t find anything to really read on the topic.

My numbers come directly from FPC, DART, and Idaho DFW data. As far as records go, go back to the ten year average numbers for the last 15 years. There was a continuous increase in fish returns until 2015. As far as the "RECORDS", try to even find fish return data from the time the last dam on the Snake, (Lower Granite) was completed. It is hard to do, but the data is available. As far as the smolt data, that came directly from the people who did it.

Arguing with an idealog is like taking a whiz in a dark suit. I am not trying to do either. What I am saying is that if removing dams is the only way to restore the salmon population, why is it only Snake River dam removals that will solve the problem? If a salmon breeds on the Hanford Reach, do they look to see if their little darling has an adapose fin? If a fish is born to two parents without adapose fins and the fry is born with an adapose fin, and it doesn't get it burned off, is it a wild fish? Are salmon being born with 3 tails due to genetic lack of diversity? Ever been to Alaska? Ain't no dams there. You can drive right to spawning grounds there. The guys and gals are so thick, you can walk across them and not get wet. Ask the Alaska DFW what is happening to the Alaskan salmon population. I think we had this same arguement with Spotted Owls. If two teenagers can breed in the back of a Volkswagon, two spotted owls can breed in 1,000,000 acres of forest. That arguement went on for years until a Spotted Owl nest was found in a Walmart sign.

I grew up in the 60's. I witnessed the birth and death of the Hippie generation in 1967. I witnessed the death of the Woodstock Nation @ Altamont in 1969. The next year, I watched the birth of the green movement with the first Earth Day. Same people, different mission. This is not about ideologies. This is about honest questions ignored for the promotion of an agenda. Simple as that.

If we are so worried about the poor salmon, why do we only worry about them when they get to Eastern Washington? Probably for the same reason we can kill 600,000 a year smoking, but we MUST stop vaping. It's about the money. Money drives politics. Stop fishing on the Columbia for one year and find out howmany politicians will be out of work. We are looking to destroy billions of dollars of existing dams to save fish that are caught before they even get to where the dams are? We eat billions of chickens a year. We don't have a chicken crisis. The argument could divulge into absurdity. It always devolves into, "If you don't agree with us, you are one of them".


I am not one of anything other than a 68 year old guy that is too old and fat to hunt anymore; so I fish. I see things that go on around me and see what is SUPPOSED to happen based on a certain action, but see something totally different happen AFTER that action is taken. I see people shut down Central Valley farmers to protect a snail darter until people ***** about food prices. Then the snail darter isn't so important anymore.
We a
were OUT OF OIL in 1973. We will all die if we exceed 1 billion people on the planet. We have all of these things that WILL happen if we DON'T do something, but the threat is rarely the reality.

My question is simple. If taking out dams WILL restore the salmon populations, please explain WHO the restored salmon populations will benefit. If the smolts can not get to the ocean, why not. If the salmon can not get trucked around the dams, why not? If the drainages can not produce enough fish to have a sufficient return, define a sufficient return. We can farm chickens, why can't we farm more smolts? Yet we close more hatcheries than build new ones. Do hatcheries only breed clipped fish? Do only wild fish breed in wild streams? How does a fish know what it is supposed to do if it is unaware of the agenda directed against it?Yada yada yada. If we provide more services for homeless people, will we facilitate more homeless people or fewer? The solution to politically driven problems rarely meet expectations.

I believe that before we destroy something we can not replace after the OOPSO is discovered, these simple questions need to be answered without agenda or bias. Nothing more, nothing less

There’s no way to engage in this debate without agenda or bias, that’s why there’s a debate over it.
You have a bias toward the dams, their right to exist because we built and benefit from them and your agenda is to defend them. That’s pretty clear.
I have a bias toward the fish, their right to exist and my agenda is to support anything that could help make that happen. I think that’s also pretty clear.
No reason to pretend otherwise and there’s nothing wrong with that.

History and science is clear that dams damage wild runs. There is no debating that without an extreme bias toward dams to the point of denying reality. Only question left is can wild runs exist at all with all the damming we’ve done.

The Snake River dams are targeted because they’d provide the most “bang for our buck” in restoring salmon habitat. After Lower Granite there isn’t another one to Hells Canyon. No one seriously believes all dams in the Colombian drainage system can be removed. For those of us that believe we should still try something why not where it could be the most effective?
It’s a stretch to think these Snake dams will ever be removed. It’s just a debate at this point and has a long, long way to go before anything actually happens. That’s if it’s ever approved which is far from guaranteed. We’ll see.
There is no guarantee that removing them will bring salmon back but doing nothing certainly won’t help.

I support hatcheries and think we should be increasing production as much as possible. They’re necessary due to dams, harvest and habitat degradation impacts on wild runs. I’d prefer healthy wild runs but in the absence of them hatchery fish will have to do.

https://www.nwcouncil.org/sites/default ... .JPG?itok=

Take a look at that graph, it captures both hatchery and wild, until the last few years we were having relatively good runs compared to the bad runs before but that’s comparing it to bad runs. A D grade looks good compared to Fs and there were still Fs during the “good” years.
Compared to historical abundance they are all pitiful. Estimates vary but generally range from 6-16 million salmon used to return to the Columbia drainage system.

Salmon, hatchery and wild, are declining all over their ranges for a lot reasons, I won’t pretend to understand them all and certainly don’t believe we can now influence all of them, some are simply out of our control. Breaching the Snake River dams may do nothing given all the other challenges. We don’t know but I believe salmon are worth trying all we reasonably can.

Having said all that I hope there are still “good” years ahead regardless if the dams stay or go. I just doubt it long term without more action taken. I’m attached to these fish and the experience of being out with friends & family fishing for them. I find these fish and all they give us simply amazing. I’ll miss them terribly if they go away. Pretty sure I’m not alone in that.

Anyhow I’ve said my peace on the topic and doubt we’ll find common ground on the core question of breaching the Snake dams. It’s been fun to discuss. Take care.

Now we might be getting somewhere. I don't have any bias as to whether the dams should stay or go. My problem is with spending thousands of dollars for boats, gear and licenses to fish for a species that should be able to be caught at this end of the drainage. If all who have a stake in PAYING for this problem were treated equally, no problem. But they are not. If the requirement is to provide better returns, why have the rules changed to allow 90% + of the runs to be taken before the fish ever get to the source of the supposed problem. If we were told the truth from those who are SUPPOSED to know the answers, and not the situational truth from those who are there to insure that the ox that is to be gored have the least political footprint, questions would have answers , and double speak would not be necessary to promote the desired outcome.

I have asked many, many questions in this post. Basically, none have been answered. These conversations ALWAYS come down to US Vs THEM because the questions asked are too much trouble to answer. They are simple questions that one would think should be easy to answer, but the answers to these are always wrapped around other things. The old addage, "If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffel 'em with b******t", seems to apply here.

As far as bias goes, I have shown none. All I am asking is why only Snake river dams? Doesn't matter whether there will be more fish or less. If the genius' who came up with this plan can't or won't answer the simple questions, what makes you think the hard choices are correct? The kind of solutions that come out of hacks that gave us spike only elk hunting are driving this train. Didn't fix a thing. I have hunted the Selkirks and the Blues for 25 years. Haven't seen a Game Warden in that 25 years. What I have seen is a lot of 2-3month old spike carcasses. If only select groups can take multi point bulls, if they take all the spikes off season, which they can and do, they then can take them all. Youv'e got the hacks that released millions of yellowjackets to deal with wheat aphids. Guess what happens when the wheat is harvested? People looked like pin cushions. Oops. How about repopulating the earth with turkeys. Sure wasn't for the hunters. The 200-300 I see every day can't be hunted. I live in a residential area. I have watched thousands of fish being netted. The nets are cleared around 1-2 in the morning time and time again. Ain't no game wardens around. Look at me rule making seems to be the priority. Enforcement is by convenience only. There are countless fishermen who can talk about thousands of examples like this. If the powers that be refuse more than a token show of enforcement of existing rules, are they really concerned about recovery, or are more concerned with keeping their jobs and simply going along to get along?

I love it when someone asks questions about a subject, the responders don't answer the questions, and then state a point of view, (theirs), and then state that anything otherwise is a bias. If I chose to express a bias, it might sound something like, "Let's ban all fossile fuels, Let's give FREE healthcare to everybody, let's let anyone who wants to, come into the country, anyone who needs to, should be able to poop on the grocery store floor", etc, etc. THAT is bias. Restoring salmon runs is a worthy idea. But are we prepared to say enough is enough when we restore runs to pre 1930 numbers. People forget that pre 1930's numbers were based on pre 1930's populations, pre 1930's commercial fishing, pre 1930's power demands, etc. What is the target return number? Anyone who quotes the halcyon days, never lived in the halcyon days.

I am one of those old school guys that say when approached with a big idea asks, "Why do you want to"?. I also taught my kids that if someone tells you something, and you don't understand it, and they can't explain it in such a way that you can understand it, either they don't know what they are talking about or they don't want you to understand it. Of course you can also be dismissed with a name such as sexist, bigot, homophobe, racist, or a thousand other names designed as a conversation stopper.

I was hoping that this post would stir the juices of other fishermen who have seen what I have seen in the last few years. I was hoping to connect with those who also think that the intent was to insure the Eastern Washington, Central Idaho and Northern Eastern Oregon fishermen take the brunt of the hits when addressing this issue. Maybe those people are no longer frequenting this site. I know that while posting this stuff, mostly I was the only member with 20-40 guests on site at any given time. Used to be this was a fishermens driven site. Now it sure seems to be a sponsor driven site. I know that a lot of river guides have taken it in the shorts pretty hard in the last few years. Figured they would chime in here. Figured that a lot of the fishermen who haven't just said s***w it, would have also. Guess i was in error.

Oh well, it is what it is.

I've only been fishing the snake a couple years now. I've lived here 30 years. I would miss all the other fishing opportunities and family time the dams supply. I do fish salmon steelhead and my answer is easy, I'll pay a little more, build more hatcheries, and let us catch a few fish.