January 11 column

[Pete Heley]

Nice weather had lots of crabbers hitting the lower Umpqua River and some of them made some pretty decent catches. High river flows seemed to indicate hitting Half Moon for boat crabbers and the Old Coast Guard Pier for dockbound crabbers, but surprisingly, someone crabbing off from Dock A caught eight legal crabs by noon and had not intention of stopping at eight. Make no mistakes, the crabbing is tougher than it was a few weeks ago, but legal crabs are still being caught.
Outside of the Umpqua, Smith and Siuslaw rivers, low water has slowed down steelheading success. A decent rain should perk up the steelhead fishing in all of the area’s smaller streams.

Anglers fishing off the jetties forming the Triangle on the south side of the Umpqua River mouth have enjoyed good success - as usual, mostly greenling and striped surfperch, but a few rockfish and lingcod have been caught as well. Anglers need to remember that cabezon are illegal to keep through March and that goes for shore anglers as well as boat anglers.
There are several reasons that hatchery salmon and steelhead have their adipose fin clipped. It is a small fin, seemingly without function, yet is relatively easy for an angler to notice prior to actually landing a fish. Many individuals and organizations involved in raising salmonid species resent having to clip their fish prior to release. Now it seems, they may actually have a legitimate reason for that resentment besides a slight increase in fish mortality. In a short article by Terry Sheely in the current issue of Northwest Flyfishing, he quotes research that found that the tiny, seemingly useless adipose fin is full of nerves, aids in spawning (as a sexual turn-on, and contributes to growth. In fact, the adipose fin serves as an early warning system for detecting. Since there is also evidence that female spawning fish prefer males with unclipped adipose fins, perhaps clipping a different fin, such as one of the two pelvic fins on the ventral side or bottom of the fish. Hopefully, further research would not reveal losing a pelvic fin having similar negative effects. Further research on hatchery fish with an intact adipose fin might well reveal that those “spawning problems” might be greatly reduced or go away entirely.

One result of dam repair on southwest Idaho’s Dworshak Reservoir is that thousands of kokanee got flushed through the dam and into the Clearwater River system and the trout that were big enough to feed on the kokanee, many of which died or suffered major physical trauma from the plunge from the 350 foot high dam, gained enough fat from the new oily forage base to assume triploid trout proportions. Triploids are sterilized rainbow trout that often become incredibly fat due to not having to let spawning duties and migrations get in the way of their constant eating. One trout taken below the dam last year barely exceeded 30-inches in length, yet weighed well over 20 pounds. The angler catching the fish felt compelled to release it since it was not fin-clipped, even though it obviously was not a steelhead.

As for some other jumbo fish, 2011 produced a giant spotted bass for Lisa Hardy. Lisa was only using line testing five pounds when she hooked and pulled the jumbo spot from the waters of Whiskeytown Lake locateed in northern California west of Redding. Lisa refused to give any details regarding what fooled the lunker spot because some of her local competition might be paying attention. Lisa’s spot missed besting the current world record spot, which came from California’s Pine Flat Reservoir, by mere ounces.

According to a friend who works on some of the construction projects on the upper North Umpqua River, a 12 pound brown that was captured when the aquaduct above Soda Springs Reservoir was dewatered now has a new home in nearby Lemolo #2 Forebay. The brown managed to survive and grow in the, pretty much structure-free, environment by hanging out in a short section of the aquaduct which only had one side of concrete - using the natural mountainside for the other side. It is undoubtedly the most physically fit brown trout in the North Umpqua system that is anywhere near its 12 pound, 32-inch size.

A new ODFW headquarters building is in the not so distant future. The ODFW is currently leasing the building that serves as its current headquarters and the new building, which is located at 4030 Fairview Industrial Drive SE in Salem, is expected to be bought and renovated by the time the ODFW’s lease on their current headquarters building expires at the end of August in 2013. The purchase is to be financed by a 16 million dollar bond and is estimated to save the department five million dollars over the 25 year repayment of the bond which will be repaid out of department revenues from licenses and tag revenues.