Kill more groundfish!
ODFW is increasing the bag limit on groundfish to 7-per day starting May 1st. As part of the agency’s obsession with “Increasing Angler Opportunity”, biologists decided six just wasn’t enough. A week from today, you’ll able to kill one more of these slow growing, slow-to-reproduce, near shore fish! Thanks guys!
$100 million project to get salmon and steelhead up the desert goes bonk
The $100 million project to get fish passage at Pelton Round-Butte Dam on Lake Billy Chinook went FUBAR earlier this month when a part of the new apparatus broke free and fell to the bottom of the reservoir. The plan would have helped Chinook and Steelhead move up into the Upper Deschutes, Crooked and Metolius. Buster Wants to Fish says the tower setback doesn’t really matter, since the whole project relies on trucking fish past the dams.
Wild Steelhead Festival in Bend tomorrow night
The Save Wild Steelhead Festival is coming to the Bend Orvis store, featuring the films “Raising The Ghost,” by Team FlyBoys and “Steelhead Yawning,” by Wahoo Films. Writer and Patagonia Fishing Ambassador, Dylan Tomine, will make his “State of the Steelhead” presentation, accompanied by photographer Tim Pask’s images.
Removing dams on the Elwah
A $54 million chunk of federal stimulus money will speed removal of two aging, salmon-killing dams from the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula. From the Seattle PI: Built early in the 20th Century, in contravention of state fish protection laws, the dams blocked salmon migration on all but the lower five miles of the Elwha. The river is the largest watershed on the Olympic Peninsula. The dam removal will open up 70 miles of the Elwha to salmon spawning. A century ago, the river was home to 100-pound Chinook salmon.
Increasing Angler Opportunity – Yeah Boy!
It won’t be long till were “increasing our opportunity” on all the great sucker holes…
The more I learn about the agencies involved, the less I like what’s going on. Angler opportunity my fat aunt Fanny, more like “Increasing angler license sales” and they’ll do this till theirs nothing left to argue over… let alone fish for. I guess I would like to invite everyone to stop by your local ODFW district office and ask some questions about “YOUR” favorite waters and what is being done to “Increase habitat, wild fish protection, water quality, or whatever floats your boat” ……
If you dig just a little, you won’t like what you uncover…
As a small point of clarification regarding my opinion on the fish tower FUBAR; the collapse of the tower doesn’t matter, not because the fish get trucked around anyway, but because the true objective of the entire project has already been achieved: federal relicensing of the dam complex.
My focus on trucking fish around the dams was to point out the disingenuousness of the plan as a whole, going by the conventional wisdom that any chain, or in this case parts of a restoration project, is only as strong as its weakest link. Trucking fish around dams is a weak fix to a big problem.
WTF? I’m tired of hearing about all of this “increase angler opportunity” BS spewing from the mouths of F&W…Don’t they realize that without any fish, there will be no anglers? one would think…especially since the steelhead and salmon runs have been so decimated.
not only will there be a bunch of “sucker holes”, they’ll start touting pikeminnow as something everyone should try on the bbq….
I can’t wait until I can fish for Western Pond turtles once they make it a limit of 5 for those guys…
ok, rant over…
Groundfish, to the best of my limited knowledge, are managed so as to maintain populations equal to 40 percent of “estimated” pre-exploition levels. Really not too shabby when compared against the management of threatened/endangered salmonids.