Spring chinook salmon fishing in the lower Columbia River will reopen for eight days beginning Friday, with a fair chance angling will continue beyond April 15.
The Columbia River is high and dirty.
"It's a tough and meager fishery until we see conditions improve and that will only happen over time,'' said Randy Woolsey, a member of the bi-state Columbia River Recreational Advisory Group.
Fishing closed, as scheduled, on Tuesday. State biologists tallied the catch and determined that 51 percent of the allocation of upper Columbia spring chinook remains.
Sportsmen kept 5,800 total chinook through Monday. Their share of upper Columbia fish was 4,700 handled with 3,820 either kept or killed during release, said Robin Ehlke of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
That leaves a balance of 3,930 upper Columbia chinook available for sports fishing downstream of Bonneville Dam.
Streamflow in the lower Columbia has skyrocketed from 250,000 cubic feet per second to almost 400,000 cfs in the past few days. Normal is about 177,000 cfs. Water clarity has dropped from 4 feet on Friday to 2 feet on Wednesday.
Those conditions make for very poor catches.
"We may be on kind of an elephant hunt,'' said Ed Wickersham of Ridgefield, government relations chair of the Coastal Conservation Association.
Biologist Jimmy Watts of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said there is no chance the sport fleet will exceed their 3,930 upper Columbia salmon balance in the eight days.
Washington and Oregon will meet again at 2 p.m. April 14 to review catches and consider a second extension.
"Our intent is to continue the fishery if possible without a delay,'' said Guy Norman, regional director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Only 338 spring chinook have been counted at Bonneville Dam. The forecast is for an upper Columbia run of 198,000, but less than 1 percent traditionally has passed Bonneville by this date.
Stuart Ellis of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission asked the states to not reopen sport fishing until the count at Bonneville improves.
The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration is forecasting the river will drop some, but those projections are as uncertain as the weather, said John North of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Harry Barber of Washougal, also a CCA member, said there already have been large releases of water from the Snake River dams.
"We're going to have high flows and we're going to have to deal with it,'' Barber said.
