December 13th column

[Pete Heley]

Winter steelhead are in all the local streams, but Eel Creek will not be legal to fish until January 1st. Crabbing remains good at Winchester Bay and the few people fishing the South Jetty and Triangle Area are catching bottomfish. Salmon fishing, with the exception of the south coastal streams, is pretty much over.

A few anglers have been fishing the Umpqua’s South Jetty for bottomfish, but sand shrimp has been in short supply. Three anglers on Sunday used frozen sand shrimp and laid their hooks next to a frozen shrimp and used stretchy thread to hold the bait to the hook. They reported very good fishing for greenling and striped surfperch and even caught a cabezon.

Crabbing continues to be surprisingly good at Winchester Bay with virtually every boat crabbers catching limits and some of the crabs are being taken as far upriver as a half mile above the entrance to the East Boat Basin. Dock crabbers are having to work harder for their crabs, but are still making decent catches. It seems that every crab that is more than a half-inch beyond the legal minimum of five and three-quarters inches has been full. The ocean will open on December 15th to both commercial and sport crabbers.

Randy Henry, the policy analyst for the Oregon State Marine Board, has come out with a list of several tips towards better boating etiquette on small streams and rivers. The timing is good as winter steelhead season is a peak time for boater -boater and boater-bank angler problems. Here are Randy’s tips. (1) - Boat anglers should minimize motor use on small rivers. Drift boayts do not plane - increased throttle provides little increase in speed, but creates a larger wake and more noise. Have patience and travel slowly. If motoring back upstream means disrupting bank anglers, limit your trips. (2) - Boat away from bank anglers to avoid interrupting their fishing. If boating away would put you over holding water, communicate your intentions to float by the bank angler to avoid spooking his fish. (3) - If a bank angler or a boater has a fish on, give the angler room to play and land the fish. Reel in your line and move away. (4) - Bank anglers need to share their fishing holes with boaters. Acknowledge and work with the boater. You take a turn, they get a turn. Invite boaters to fish through, then return to fishing as they are safely past. (5) - If a boater is restricting your ability to fish, ask them to modify their activity so that you can also fish. If they refuse, adjust your activity until they leave. (6) - In areas where boat use is common, bank anglers should avoid wading to the middle of the channel or to the top of their waders. Likewise, don’t cast across the river and expect boats not to pass through. Bank anglers legally cannot restrict navigation. (7) - Bank anglers fishing narrow, fast water, should watch carefully for boaters and let them pass. Boats have a limited control in these waters. Don’t place yourself or fishing gear in restricted areas unless you can quickly move out of the way.

Bank anglers and boaters both have the right to access and use the rivers for angling. Boating is a legal and traditional activity. If boaters and bank anglers are fishing the same hole, it is reasonable and polite for the boater to fish the hole twice and move along. Henry adds, “It really comes down to sharing the waterways. Aggressive fishing and boat operation might put you on fish, but it will cost you a potential friend and maybe your fishing access”.

Keeping up on California’s fishing problems has to make our anglers feel better about living in Oregon. It wasn’t very long ago that a lawsuit forced the state fisheries biologists to do environmental impact statements on virtually every body of water that the state stocked and now it looks like the fee fishing lakes are going to have to do the same thing - at a cost of up to $100,000. Making matters worse is the state’s intent to drastically increase the daily and possession limits on striped bass will reducing the minimum size to a mere 12-inches. Under the proposal, which almost every California angler seems to oppose, would raise the two striper daily limit to six and the possession limit from two to 12, but making matters even worse is that the striper limit for Clifton Court Forebay and other specified waters would be 20 stripers per day with the possession limit of 40 and no minimum size limit. Anglers statewide, caught with excess numbers or undersized speciments of striped could always say that they caught them at Clifton Court Forebay or one of the other spots with ridiculous limits.

For the Oregon bass anglers that have been thinking about purchasing and using an Alabama Rig, the hottest new bass lure on the market, they need to realize that the lure needs to be tinkered with before it is legal in Oregon or even California waters - both of which are restricted to three hooks or three lures when fishing for gamefish. The Alabama Rig is made up of five wires spread out so that the lures attached to each wire is separated far enough to minimize snagging. Difficult to cast, the lure resembles a school of bait fish when five soft plastic jerkbaits are added. Using just three hooked jerkbaits would make the lure legal to use. Of a more questionable nature would be adding two more soft plastic jerkbaits without hooks. If the center and two outside baits had hooks, the percentage of bass that grab the baits without hooks would be minimal.

A recent post on Ifish.net showed a copy of Oregon’s 1934 fishing regulations. What I noticed were that the trout limits were extremely generous, similar to the allowed poundage plus one fish that the Washington state used for so many years. I also noticed that there were virtually no regulations concerning warmwater fish and fishing was not allowed anywhere between one hour after sundown until one hour before sunrise and that resident and nonresident fishing licenses cost the same. While most people viewing the post would have paid the most attention to the $3.00 annual fishing license (no tags were required back then), it only means something if you can put figure out what it means in today’s economy. So here goes - $3.00 in 1934 would translate into: $50.50 (Consumer Price Index); $42.30 (GDP deflator); $141.00 (unskilled wage); $180.00 (Production Worker Compensation); $313.00 (nominal GDP per capita) and $773.00 (relative share of GDP). To show how quickly things can change, if one uses the $4.00 fishing license of 1954 as a base, those figures in the same order would be: $32.40, $27.20, $44.10. $53.70, $80.00 and $153.00.