The Oregonian
By Bill Monroe
February 18, 2012

Shortly after 6 a.m. Friday, Paul Skaggs  and I pulled into the last empty single-vehicle parking spaces in the Cedaroak  boat ramp parking lot.
 
“We should go buy lottery tickets,” he said with a chuckle. Skaggs is a volunteer host in the L.L. Stub Stewart State Park  in Washington County and had driven to the Willamette River for the first of a four-day sturgeon retention fishing season.

 
He’d landed a free ride in a boat from an unknown Internet acquaintance and lucked out again by finding the last place to park in what turned out to be one of the most unusual fishing days in recent memory on the lower Willamette River.
 
Lottery winners indeed. Out on the water, in the pre-dawn gloom, so many green, red and white navigation lights sparkled, I was reminded of the Christmas ship parades barely two months ago.
 
Between Lake Oswego and Willamette Falls, more than 300 boats would anchor by dawn, filled with anglers hoping to catch and take home a legal-sized sturgeon.
 
Two dozen trailer-pulling rigs were in the parking lot at Gladstone’s Meldrum Bar shortly after it opened at 4 a.m. and Sportcraft Marina in Oregon City was choked with trailers well before daylight. At Cedaroak, late arrivals ended up parked outside an elementary school half a mile uphill from the river.
 
“It’s crazy,” said Sgt. Chris Allori  of the Oregon State Police fish and wildlife division. “It’s more effort than I’ve ever seen on the river.”
 
More even than a busy spring chinook day, Allori said, “because of all the bank anglers. We’re seeing them on rocks, beaches, docks. … They’re all over the place.”
 
Gary Waterhouse  at Great American Tackle Co. in Clackamas, quickly sold out of his week’s shipment of 90 dozen sand shrimp, a popular sturgeon bait. He wasn’t sure Friday he would get any more in the near future because he was told the person who pumps most of the shrimp for his supplier in Willapa Bay was arrested Thursday evening on an outstanding warrant.
 
“Not much I can do about that,” he said.
 
Friday was the first of just four days this year when anglers will be allowed to keep sturgeon in the Willamette River.
 
Saturday was the second, but whether retention fishing will continue the third and fourth days, this Friday and Saturday, remains to be seen.
 
Steve Williams,  assistant fisheries chief for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, said Oregon wants to keep the legal-sized sturgeon catch below 2,022 in the Willamette River and Multnomah Channel/Gilbert River.
 
His staff estimated between 1,000 and 1,100 boats fished Friday.
 
Their catch rate was about one fish per boat, Allori said. Add the bank catch and Saturday’s tallies and it’s possible either or both fishing days this week might have to be eliminated. Monday is a holiday, but Williams said the department will take a close look Tuesday.
 
Allori, meanwhile, spent Friday and Saturday coordinating a massive saturation patrol of the Willamette by 20 troopers and marine sheriff’s deputies from Multnomah and Clackamas counties in “Operation Leviathan.”
 
He said officers wrote numerous citations for undersized sturgeon, no licenses and/or tags and failure to record catches. Compliance — the percentage of those checked who were within the law — was higher than he expected between Milwaukie and Oregon City, but fell to about 50 percent farther downriver, Allori said.
 
One fish checker told Allori a man in a kayak landed a legal sturgeon and towed it to shore.
 
We anchored just upriver from Lake Oswego and saw a few other kayak anglers, among the sturgeon fleet.
 
Our first, biggest and only keeper sturgeon was caught by 11-year-old Megan Ehl  of Happy Valley. The fish bit a smelt from a vacuum package labeled “2003.”
 
Son Bill Monroe Jr. of Gresham inadvertently hooked a 46-incher in the tail and before we released it, spotted a tag in the base of its dorsal fin.
 
Oregon and Washington tag sturgeon to monitor their movement, growth rates and habitat preferences, among other things.
 
A phone call to the Clackamas regional office of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and a brief computer search showed this one was tagged by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in May 2010, not far upriver from Tongue Point. It was 36 inches at the time.

Not research: Oregon State Police are investigating a recent spate of illegal fin clippings in the Umpqua and Rogue rivers.
 
Troopers said a person or persons are catching wild winter steelhead, clipping the adipose fins and releasing them back to the rivers.
 
State law requires most kept steelhead to have the adipose clip, but also says the scar must be well-healed.
 
Anyone who catches a steelhead with a freshly clipped adipose fin should release the fish unharmed, then report the location, time and date of the catch to their nearest State Police office.

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