8-8 SS High Water Return

High water hope! We all know that we had too much rushing water in our Northwest rivers this year as a result of the high snowpack and wet spring. It prevented a lot of us from fishing this spring but in the end it was money in the bank. Here is Josh Mills to explain: “ I want to put a little glimmer of hope into the horizon because 2 to 3 years from now we could be reaping the dividends from this. What happens is is that salmon and steelhead that smolt on their downstream migration are greatly aided by this high water. It makes their journey downstream a lot easier on them. They expend less energy and by the time they hit the salt, you are going to have a much healthier fish. What that leads to is a much healthier stock of fish that will eventually return back to our rivers. Steelhead in our area are for the most part are too salt meaning 2 years in the ocean. 1 to 2 salt fish meaning they spend one to 2 years in the North Pacific and then rotate back into the Columbia or Puget Sound rivers. Occasionally you have some three salt fish which are Clearwater fish and possibly the John Day and maybe some Klickitat fish but for the most part these fish are going to be coming back in this 2 to 3 year window. Salmon, sometimes a little more, your Chinook are going to be 3 to 4 to 5 year but that downstream pulse of water pushes the fish along and pushes them out into the Columbia estuary, and out they go to get bigger and stronger and hopefully in a 2 to three-year period of time we get a big pulse of fish like we did in 2009 which was the record number of steelhead which was over 600,000 fish over Bonneville dam, so cross your fingers.