Has Trask Fall Run Been Permanently Damaged?

[drifter]

Greetings all. Haven't posted in a while.

Subject: I have been fishing the Trask for 15 years without fail. Never miss the first rain and the annual migration of nooks up the river. Just something special about landing a big chinook from the bank.

It seems to me that the 1996 flood and other enviromental factors have irreparable damanged the fall chinook run.

I had great expectations for 2001, but it doesn't seem to be much of an improvement. Certainly, not compared to years past.

So, my question - has the fall chinook run been damaged permanently or does it still have a chance to be what it once was? Thanks in advance for your comments. Drifter.

[Pilar]

Hi Drifter, welcome back. Is it the Trask specifically or the whole bay in general? There are 5 rivers in Tillamook bay and they all seem to be producing less chinook these past years.

Fishing in the lower bay for the last 2 years has been pretty spotty. I just assumed that the migration patterns changed or that I had forgotten how to catch them.

The anniversary for the 1996 class of fish is last year and this one. Correct me any fisheries biologists but don't most chinook return as 4 and 5 year fish? We all figured on some consequence of the flooding in 1996, maybe this is it.

The other thing is that the Ocean conditions were pretty grim too then. A double whammy. Poor spawning conditions followed by grim Ocean health. A warm and barren Ocean is a tough place for a salmon to grow up. The few nooks that hatched out then went to Sea to get eaten by hungry predators and had little to eat themselves.

Does anyone know where the fish went?

[fisheromen]

My .02 cents is that these things are incredibly resilient and that there are other factors in play. Walk on any river bank and you can see that there have been much worse floods than '96 yet the rivers rebounded. So take heart! And just look at the coho runs we would've had this year (without gillnets) on Columbia tribs compared to some of the runs in previous years. It had nothing to do with river conditions but everything to do with ocean conditions along their migratory routes.

[rob allen]

here is something you may find interesting
http://home.teleport.com/~salmo/docs/stocks.pdf

pages 16-34