Spring chinook salmon and sturgeon fishing seasons will be adopted on Tuesday when Washington and Oregon officials meet at Clackamas County Historical Society, 211 Tumwater Drive, Oregon City.
The joint state hearing begins at 10 a.m. Public testimony will be taken.
Here’s a look at the decisions to be made:
Spring chinook — A run of 198,400 spring chinook is forecast to return to the Columbia destined for upstream of Bonneville Dam and 104,000 are predicted back for Oregon’s Willamette River.
To guard against overpredicting, the states will manage the upper Columbia River with a 30 percent buffer until after a mid-May forecast update. That means allocations will be set as if the run will be only 138,880.
That breaks down to 7,600 upper Columbia spring chinook for sportsmen downstream of Bonneville Dam, 1,600 for anglers upstream of Bonneville, and 2,100 for the commercial fleet.
Actual harvest numbers will be larger, because chinook headed for the Willamette, Cowlitz, Kalama and Lewis rivers will supplement the catch.
The big decision here is how much fishing will be allowed upstream of Interstate 5, where the upper Columbia catch is not diluted by Willamette chinook.
Sturgeon — Sport and commercial sturgeon harvest in the lower Columbia is being reduced in 2011 to no more than 17,000 fish, down from a guideline of 24,000 in 2010 and an actual catch of 18,506.
Shorter retention seasons will be needed this year for certain in the stretch between the Wauna power lines near Cathlamet and Bonneville Dam, in the lower Willamette, and possibly in the estuary.
The big decision here is when will those fisheries be shortened? The best guess is some time will be lost in October in the lower Columbia and the November-December retention period in the lower Willamette.
Commercial — Officials will review the on-going winter gillnet fishery for sturgeon and discuss plans for gillnetting for spring chinook.
The net fishery for chinook did not start until March 30 in 2010.
But this year, the commercials have as many as 6,500 Willamette-origin spring chinook available and netting may start as early as late February to harvest some of those fish before the upper Columbia chinook enter the river.
