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Salmon run has plenty of fish – but not many that bite

Scott Swanson

The Chinook salmon run at Foster Dam is the best in years, but some local fishermen are wondering where the fish are going.

“They’re just not biting,” said Jim Slater-Roth of Sweet Home Friday morning as he loaded his boat after a morning of nothing. “The run’s been horrible.”

He said he has boated one salmon and had three others on his line so far this year.

“Hopefully, it’ll get better,” he said.

Ronald Palmer of Lebanon, fishing near the Wiley Park boat ramp, said things have been slow for him this year.

“The last fish I caught was in the middle of last season,” said Palmer, a regular on the riverbank, referring to his salmon success. “I caught my limit of trout the other day, but I haven’t caught a single (salmon) this year.”

Brett Boyd, who has managed the South Santiam Hatchery for the past nine years, said Chinook numbers “look like they’re going to come in well above average,” but summer steelhead are at only about one-third the level they were last year at this time, late in the run.

As of Friday, 4,162 Chinook had passed through the fish trap near the base of Foster Dam and “we still have a lot of fish holding before the dam, waiting to enter the trap,” Boyd said. At the end of June 2014, the salmon count was 1,139.

As of May 12, 2,142 of this year’s salmon had been recycled – trucked back and returned to the river at Pleasant Valley Bridge and below the falls at Waterloo. Of those, 1,100 have re-appeared in the trap and have been donated to food banks or sold to a fish buyer.

“They haven’t been biting as well,” Boyd acknowledged. He said the hatchery has been using a new anesthetic that “is easier on the fish – they recover a lot better” before releasing them downstream. He said previous anesthetic treatments took longer to wear off.

“They don’t hang around now,”: he said. “They zip back up river pretty quick. We’re monitoring that real close. We’e putting Chinook below the falls to slow it down a little bit. That’s our hope.”

Typically, he said, salmon are recycled at Pleasant Valley, where the hole seems to be more desirable to that species, and steelhead to Waterloo.

This year’s steelhead run has thus far numbered only 353 fish. Last year there were 1,050 by this time.

“We’re hoping they’re just late,” Boyd said, adding that due to the low numbers, no steelhead have been recycled. All those arriving thus far are being used for broodstock.

Of the salmon, 366 have been wild fish thus far. Boyd said that number stays pretty constant, and variances in the percentage of wild fish in the run are due more to how many hatchery-born salmon return to the trap.

He said that although warm water temperatures have been blamed for salmon deaths in the Willamette River recently (see accompanying article), though South Santiam temperatures have been “running a little warmer than normal,” they have risen no higher than 56 degrees, which is well below the critical mark for salmon and steelhead.

“It’s been an interesting year,” he said.

Jack Legg, owner of DanDee Sales, said he’s heard the same story “over and over again” this season: “Lots of fish and not a lot of action.

“We’ve heard a lot of four-letter words,” Legg said. “This is probably one of the best runs we;’ve had recently, but they just haven’t been biting.”

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