Spring chinook fishing shifts into higher gear now with the arrival of March and the opening of angling in the lower Columbia River upstream of Interstate 5.
Last week, Washington and Oregon adopted the early portion of the lower Columbia spring salmon season. There is at least one reliable report of a spring chinook being caught from the lower Columbia, plus fish have been taken from the Kalama and Cowlitz rivers.
Water visibility is 3 feet in the Columbia River at Bonneville Dam and 2 feet in the Willamette River at the Morrison Bridge.
Fishing in the lower Columbia will be open daily through April 6 with a catch allocation of 6,905 spring chinook destined for the middle and upper Columbia and Snake rivers.
Angling with a boat is open from Buoy 10 to the Beacon Rock. Bank anglers also can fish upstream to Bonneville Dam.
The daily bag limit is one, fin-clipped chinook. Fin-clipped steelhead also can be kept up to a limit of two steelhead, or one steelhead and one chinook. There will be no Tuesday closures this year.
Sportsmen have been allocated 80 percent of the lower Columbia harvest, up 10 percent from the past few years. No commercial fishing will be considered before an update of the run in mid-May, said Ron Roler, Columbia River policy coordinator for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
• There will be a closure area near the mouth of the Lewis River. Spring chinook returns to the North Fork of the Lewis River in 2017 are forecast to be less than the minimum needed at the hatchery.
The closed area is defined as a line from a marker on the lower end of Bachelor Island through U.S.Coast Guard buoy Red #4 to the Oregon shore, downstream to a line from the lower (north) end of Sauvie Island across the Columbia River to the downstream range marker (0.7 miles downstream of the Lewis River) and continuing along the wing jetty to the Washington shore.
• Spring chinook fishing in the mid-Columbia — between Bonneville Dam and the Washington-Oregon boundary, east of Umatilla, Ore. — will be open March 16 through May 5. The early-season allocation is 921 spring chinook.
Nearly all the chinook caught in the mid-Columbia comes in the final few days of the season. Fishing for salmon and steelhead from a boat is prohibited between Bonneville Dam and the Tower Island power lines downstream of The Dalles.
Walleye fishing has ramped up at the upper end of The Dalles pool, kokanee are starting to get caught in Merwin Reservoir and winter steelhead numbers are improving in Cowlitz River.
Icehouse Lake along state Highway 14 in Skamania County has been stocked with 1,000 rainbow trout, plus 30 large broodstock rainbow.
Angler sampling by the Washington (WDFW) and Oregon (ODFW) departments of Fish and Wildlife:
Lower Columbia — Westport, Ore., to Portland, 15 boaters with no spring chinook; four bank rods with no spring chinook. (ODFW)
Mid-Columbia — Bonneville pool, 28 boaters with one legal sturgeon kept plus two oversize and 11 sublegal sturgeon released; 10 bank rods with one legal sturgeon kept and 10 sublegals released. (WDFW)
The Dalles pool, 23 boaters with 47 walleye kept and 29 released; one bank rod with two walleye kept; four boaters with two legal sturgeon kept and 15 sublegals released; five bank rods with no catch. (WDFW)
John Day pool, 71 boaters with 31 walleye kept and 21 released; three bank rods with no walleye; 40 boaters with four oversize and eight sublegal sturgeon released. (WDFW)
Coweeman — Nineteen bank rods with two wild steelhead released. (WDFW)
Kalama — Thirty bank rods with three hatchery steelhead kept and six wild steelhead released; 32 boaters with four hatchery steelhead and one hatchery spring chinook kept plus seven wild steelhead released. (WDFW)
East Fork Lewis — Forty-five bank rods with 15 wild steelhead released; two boaters with six wild steelhead released. (WDFW)
