28 december 2011 column

[Pete Heley]

Crabbing remains quite good in the lower Umpqua River, especially for boat crabbers, but the rain predicted for this week may affect them. It is very doubtful that there will be enough rain to run the crabs out into the ocean, or into Half Moon Bay which is below where dock crabbers can get to. Right now, some boat crabbers are making excellent catches above the entrance to the East Boat Basin. Ideally, there will be enough rain to get the winter steelhead into the area’s mid-sized and smaller streams, yet no so much that the crabs are forced, by large amounts of freshwater coming down the Umpqua, out into the ocean. The Umpqua continues to produce excellent steelhead fishing, but virtually no finclipped, keepable fish. Eel Creek, the major tributary of Tenmile Creek, opens for finclipped steelhead on January 1st, but without a major amount of rain, don’t expect anything but trout to be in the stream.

Recent reports have stated that the decline in spawning ability of hatchery steelhead to spawn with wild fish can be seen in as little as one generation. The study indicated that a major problem was the domestication of the young hatchery steelhead in a hatchery environment that is a major problem in breeding success. The study obviously was much more detailed and can be found online by searching for the National Academy of Science which published the findings last week.

A recent article by Tom Sienstra of the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned the value of fish and crab that were taken by people going out on some of the combo trips for crabs and bottomfish. In the article, he stated that the filets from a limit of ten bottomfish and two lingcod added to a six crab limit could be worth as much as $350, which makes the $100 to $150 cost of the trip a very good bargain. Here in Oregon, our bottomfish limit is seven, but our lingcod limit is two - the same as for California and our limit on dungeness crabs is 12 rather than six. In other words, a person getting his limits on a combo trip along the Oregon coast would have fish filets and crabs worth a comparable amount.

For the first time in quite some time, from January 1st through March, cabezone will be illegal to keep even for shore anglers. The three month closure, which affects all anglers, will end at midnight on March 31st. When the offshore closure on bottomfishing, which normally lasts six months per year and covers waters deeper than 40 fathoms, begins this April 1st, it will be a 30 fathom closure which means that it will be illegal to target bottomfish (other than halibut in season) in waters deeper than 180 feet deep. The good news is that the ruling will have virtually no effect on curent bottomfishing practices at Winchester Bay and Florence, but will definitely impact the fishing at Charleston and Newport.

Reedsport angler, Larry Gerstner, stopped by work last Saturday to inform me that he took a couple of anglers into his favorite local perch lake and they caught more than five dozen nice-sized yellow perch on nightcrawlers including nearly two dozen that measured at least 11-inches in length. Larry also reported catching and releasing five-nice sized trout.

Poor behavior in the outdoors can have real consequences. A few years ago, the South Fork Coquille River came very close to being closed to motorized boats because of complaints against anglers, including some guides, who ran their boats repeatedly through the fishing areas of bankbound anglers. The closure to fishing the bar area on the Nehalem River might have been avoided or at least delayed with better behavior among the boat anglers fishing the area. The latest thing regarding inconsiderate angling behavior concerns the Trinity River - one of the top steelhead and salmon streams in Northern California. Much of the river runs through the Hoopa Indian Reservation. Fishing is allowed on reservation land through the purchase of a permit and Hoopa game wardens and fish checkers share fishing data with the California Department of Fish and Game. A couple of weeks ago, Hoopa fish checkers asked a small group of fishing guides what they had caught and were told that they (the guides) didn’t have to tell them anything and they wanted to be left alone. Guess what happened? The reservation very quickly became off limits to non-tribal members and that meant that anglers beginning their floats above the reservation and taking out on reservation land as well as those beginning their floats on reservation land and taking out below the reservation were out of luck as well - meaning a substantial portion of the Trinity River was off limits to non-tribal members. The inconsiderate behavior of these few guides fouled up, besides themselves, dozens of well-behaved guides as well as numerous other people that used to use or visit the reservation.

Some rather innovative detective work resulted in the reestablishment of a jumbo walleye caught more than 50 years ago, to regain its status as a world record for the species. The fish, caught by Mabry Harper, was believed by many to weigh several pounds less than claimed and for a time, was tossed out as the world record. In a recent Outdoor Life article, John Oliver detailed how he went about attempting to find out if the fish measured the reported length of 41-inches. Both Mabry and his wife Mary had long since passed away, but Oliver found a photo of Mary holding up the jumbo walleye vertically, not horizontally. Since he found out that Mary was five feet six inches tall, he enlarged the old photograph to the point where she was life-sized. At that point, Oliver measured the walleye and found it to be the same length as claimed. Further interviews of people who saw the fish and some additional paperwork resulted in the walleye reclaiming its title as an official world record.