The Columbia Basin Bulletin

More lamprey have been counted at Threemile Falls Dam on northeast Oregon’s Umatilla River in five days this year than in seven months in the previous two years.

Estimates of as many as 300 lampreys, fish that sometimes are erroneously referred to as eels, have crossed over lamprey passage structures or climbed the concrete of Three Mile Falls Dam, according to Aaron Jackson, the lamprey project leader for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

The Umatillas now have four such adult lamprey passage structures, which were paid for by Bonneville Power Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, that provide new passage routes at low-elevation diversions within the Umatilla River.

“This is our highest return since the program began in 2000,” Jackson said. “It looks like we shattered the old records within a few days.”

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KSBY

King salmon season has officially kicked off on the Central Coast. It’s a favorite among pier and boat anglers in Morro Bay and one of the most rewarding.

The beginning of the season looked very good, some were even talking record catches, but over the last few weeks, catch rates have weakened a bit, leading to soaring prices for the prized catch.

“How’d we do? One?” Chris Battle called out to fishermen arriving with their daily catch. After a quick start to salmon season, fishermen say now they’re just trying to stay afloat.

“There were high expectations of it being a phenomenal start and everyone’s kind of been let down,” said Battle of Morro Bay Fish Company.

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Greenwich Time

A nonnative snail has turned up in the Truckee River in Nevada for the first time, and wildlife officials are hoping it doesn’t harm the river’s trout population or spread to Lake Tahoe.

Nevada Department of Wildlife officials said tests have confirmed the presence of at least three New Zealand mudsnails in the river near Reno. Now they’re trying to determine the extent of the mudsnail population.

“We know we have at least a one-mile distribution, bare minimum,” Chris Crookshanks, fisheries biologist with the department of wildlife, told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Ranging in size from a grain of sand to an eighth-of-an-inch, the New Zealand mudsnail can thrive in huge densities, with up to 900,000 per square yard in parts of the Yellowstone River, researchers said.

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CVBT

The “Delta Plan,” adopted Thursday as state law by the Delta Stewardship Commission, is fatally flawed, says a nonprofit water group based in Santa Barbara.

“We find the Final Delta Plan utterly deficient. It is nothing more than a continuation of the policy that has systematically destroyed the largest estuary on the west coast of the continental United States and instigated the state’s water wars,” says the California Water Impact Network. “As such, it is not a solution to our water crisis, but a disastrous adherence to the status quo.”

The group notes that the Delta Plan ignores simple arithmetic: that the amount of water pledged to various users exceeds by five times the amount of water normally available from the combined Sacramento, Trinity and San Joaquin river basins.

“The current Delta Plan does not recognize this stark and troubling fact. This, in turn, ensures that our current — and unsustainable — state water policy will remain unabridged, condemning the Delta to continued decline,” says Carolee Krieger, founder and president of the California Water Impact Network.

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CVBT

With the Delta Stewardship Council expected to adopt the final “Delta Plan” at its May 16-17 meeting in Sacramento, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Golden Gate Salmon Association say a new analysis shows that the prized Central Valley salmon fishery is “limping along” at only 20 percent of the population goal required by state and federal law.

The Delta Plan recommends improved efficiency, more storage, the development of other local water supplies, protection of Delta farmlands and communities, and the improvement of Delta levees. It will also incorporate as state law the yet to be completed Bay Delta Conservation Plan.

That plan, urged on by Gov. Jerry Brown, is expected to call for construction of massive 35 mile long twin tunnels buried 150 feet beneath the heart of the Delta to siphon water out of the Sacramento River before it can flow naturally into the Delta. At peak flow, the tunnels could ship enough water to the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles to fill the Rose Bowl to the brim every 20 minutes.
Critics question whether that would help restore the Delta as a fishery.

The Central Valley Project Improvement Act, passed by Congress in 1992, set a goal of rebuilding salmon runs to almost a million adult fish by 2002, the NRDC notes in its report.

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The Record Searchlight

What I learned this morning at a workshop held by the Department of Water Resources on water planning, which likely won’t be news to my friends down in the rice belt but certainly was to me:

The government has spent hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars to keep the water in the Sacramento River and its major tributaries cold enough for such salmon as we still have in Northern California. The thermal curtains at Whiskeytown, the temperature-control device at Shasta Dam, etc. Bone-chillingly cold water in the Sacramento River is, apparently, the best thing for native fish.

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The Daily Astorian

A family who enjoyed fishing for salmon on an island in the Columbia River has found a way to preserve the location forever.

The Columbia Land Trust has announced that it has completed the purchase of 109-acre Kerry Island in Westport Slough, a roughly 11-mile side channel of the Columbia River. The parcel is four miles from Westport and eight miles from Clatskanie.

Kerry Island had been owned by the Jenks family since 1946. Chester Jenks and his wife, Cleo, raised their six children on the land, and ran a cattle and hay farm there until they retired in the early 2000s.

In 2010, the family contacted the Land Trust with an interest in selling the land for conservation.

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Manteca Bulletin

Federal authorities are intentionally flooding low land along the Stanislaus River in a test to see whether it will help increase the chances of salmon fingerlings making it to the Delta.

It is a study that the South San Joaquin Irrigation District and Oakdale Irrigation District have been critical of as they contend the real problem on the Stanislaus River when it comes to salmon survival are non-native predatory stripped bass intentionally planted by the state starting in the early 1900s.

Currently, 96 percent of the salmon fingerlings at Knights Ferry do not make it to Vernalis south of Manteca where the Stanislaus River joins the San Joaquin River.

“With a 4 percent survival rate at that point, you can only imagine how many get through the Delta (to the Pacific Ocean),” noted SSJID General Manager Jeff Shields.

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Columbian

Washington and Oregon officials will meet Tuesday to consider reopening sport and commercial fishing for spring chinook salmon in the lower Columbia River.

The Columbia River Compact will begin at 11 a.m. to consider gillnet fishing between Bonneville Dam and the coast. A joint state sport hearing will follow the compact session.

The Columbia River Technical Advisory Committee — a panel of state, tribal and federal biologists — issued its first spring chinook run update on Monday. In December, the committee forecast an upper Columbia run of 141,400 adult spring chinook.

On Monday, the forecast was downgraded to 107,500 upper Columbia spring chinook. Large buffers were applied to sport and commercial fishing in the lower Columbia in March and April.

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The Seattle Times

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Monday it will not continue killing gulls that have been eating baby Caspian terns at the West Coast’s largest nesting colony, located at the mouth of the Columbia River.

The corps issued an environmental assessment to decide whether the continued failure of the tern colony on East Sand Island to produce young due to predation by the gulls would drive the terns to return to another island upstream, where they consumed millions of baby salmon.

The corps concluded that new research indicates the terns are not likely to move the colony, so no action is needed. In recent years, eagles flying overhead have scared the terns into flying off their nests, allowing gulls to move in and eat the eggs and young left behind.

Federal agencies became concerned that the terns would return to Rice Island if they continued to fail to produce new young.

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