Yakima River sockeye salmon to get a boost from cool weather and water managers

YAKIMA — Several thousand sockeye salmon could make their way up the Yakima River over the next few days, helped along by cooler weather and a wave of extra water flowing down the river.

The Bureau of Reclamation began releasing an extra 6,000 acre-feet of water from its reservoirs Thursday and will contunue the release through the weekend to boost the flow reaching fish in the lower section of the river, Bureau biologist Joel Hubble said at a river operations meeting on Thursday.

Hubble said that the cool and potentially rainy conditions in the forecast are ideal for sockeye and summer chinook salmon that have been waiting in cooler Columbia River rather than heading up the warm Yakima River towards their spawning grounds.

“There’s three or four thousand sockeye waiting near Bateman Island,” said John Easterbrooks, the regional fish program manager for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. “The fish are hiding in cool places and they will head up the Yakima if conditions are good.”

Every year, the basin’s fish biologists get to decide how best to use about 18,000 acre-feet of water to benefit fish, Easterbrooks said. That’s in addition to the minimum river flow levels that have to be maintained.

Conditions in the lower river are frequently a concern for fish biologists because the slow moving water tends to get too warm in the summer, making salmon stressed and sick.

But the extra water isn’t enough to cool the river on its own, Easterbrooks said. It takes almost a day for water to flow from the cool mountain reservoirs to the warm, slow lower river and by that time, it’s warmed up.

“We’re building on a natural weather event that will cool the river,” Easterbrooks said. “Adding this pulse of water makes a better migration corridor with higher flows and faster water.”

He added that if a similar weather opportunity arrives in August, they still have enough water left to give the fish another boost.