Lewis River report

[Thumper]

"To bad that you cannot keep Chinooks now in the lewis."

Is that true? I have been away, but I am surprised to hear that.

[NoLimit]

The Lewis is open for Chinook.

http://www.wa.gov/wdfw/do/weekendr/weekendr.htm

[fishisabonus]

It was a native fish. You can't keep those. And even if you could, you shouldn't.

[GorgeCaster]

Originally posted by fishisabonus:
It was a native fish. You can't keep those. And even if you could, you shouldn't.<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helv">

[GorgeCaster]

You can keep unclipped chinook on the lewis, but no unclipped silvers.

[Thumper]

All fall chinook on the north Fork of the Lewis River are natives and may be kept. Sorry Kingfisher. We appreciate your sacrifices........

[KingFisher85]

Oh well.
The good thing about this is that I did not have to take care of any more fish or eggs. About sick :sick: of cutting and gutting the fish all the time. Was able to come home and take nice little a nap :sleep: . I thought :whazzup: that something sounded fishy when they said that I must release all Chinook.

[rob allen]

I know that it was proposed last november that the North Lewis would go wild chinook release and I thought that reg was adopted because it was proposed by WDFW staff, I'll check the regs.. With the current status of our wild runs everywhere it is my opinion that no one should have any desire to keep an unclipped fish. Not that they wouldn't be good eating just what killing that fish means to our fishing future..

[Thumper]

For many years the retention of wild fall chinook on the North Fork Lewis was banned. The runs hovered around 1,000 or so, and we carefully released all that were caught. Those were the days of the bubble release fishery at the mouth of the Lewis just to protect that precious run.

Last year the wild chinook run was 16,000 fish and we were allowed to keep them. This year the run is estimated to be over 14,000 so again we are allowed to keep them. This is an example of a wild run of one species (fall chinook) existing nicely with outstanding hatchery runs of other species (coho and summer steelhead).

And for all that you can thank a brilliant fishery management team of Rob Nicolay and the folks at Fish First.

Rob Allen --- Sometimes it just all works out perfectly.

[KingFisher85]

Just got back from fishing the North Fork of the Lewis River. SLOW!!! Very Slow, No joke.
Had the line in the water 15 mim before the sun came up. Up doing my drift that I have been doing.
On the 3 cast I hooked a fish but soon came off. Ten cast later I hooked a nice silver that jumped and tossed the hook.
By that time I thought that it was going to be a killer day. A few cast later I hooked into a good size fish. Banked it and it was about a 15 to 18 pound BRIGHT fall native Chinook that I released. To bad that you cannot keep Chinooks now in the lewis.
After that nothing. Did not even bump into anything. very slow. Very few fish even jumping down there.
The snaggers tho on the hatchery side were doing very good snagging them pre-smoked fish at the hatchery gates.

[ 10-12-2002, 12:03 PM: Message edited by: KingFisher85 ]

[ssteelheadsteve]

FYI
According to the experts the Wild Fall Chinook of the Lewis are the only remaining wild run of Chinook in the lower Columbia.

[Got Fish?]

I thought that on the lewis no hatchery chinook were clipped unless they had a cwt in the snout :whazzup: :whazzup: :whazzup:

[KingFisher85]

They clip Chinook, what do you think them springers are.
They do not put CWT tags in Chinooks, only the Coho. Most the fish that have one to many fins go to the Merwin dam fish hatchery or Cedar Creek or in the Lewis River system. The ones that are clipped go to the North Fork hatchery. Not saying this is true for all fish, but this is what I have been told helping out last spring with the WDFW putting CWT tags in fish.

This is only my second native Chinook this fall that I have banked. The rest have been clipped. I have no problem releasing these fish.

I have been seeing a lot of fin clipped Chinooks as well as native Chinooks. I have seen a good number of native silver this year to.
Its something to see when you are tagging 500 to 1000 salmon smolts a day and only one out of all of them are clipped.

[Wally02]

better safe than sorry Kingfisher. Beats getting a hell of a ticket if the season did close!!!!

I was up at the meat hole near the falls last week. Nothing but limb cod. That area has gotten real snaggy in just a couple years!