Kalama River

Salmo_g

Legend
Forum Supporter
IF!!!!!! I remember right the purpose of the wier is to remove hatchery chinook. The steelhed and coho might be delayed but otherwise unaffected. That said the good coho, "B" runs are the October/November fish which will come in when the water is high and will bypass the weir.
Talking about the lower weir. Not up at the Hatchery.
Anyone feel free to correct me..
I'm pretty sure you're right. Fall Chinook, being generally large fish, don't like to enter the dinky creek at the lower Kalama hatchery. In order to secure the fall Chinook hatchery broodstock, the weir was necessary to prevent those fish from just swimming on upstream and spawning in the river, which is still pretty small in the fall. Coho spawn in small creeks and are more than willing to swim up dinky little hatchery creeks.
 

skyrise

Steelhead
As Rob said they were known as springers. We spent much time chasing them back then. My favorite month was June. Good amount of water and not too hot during the day. My largest was 19 lbs. and was a hatchery fish as they were doing that selective sampling to get larger fish to return back then on the washougal anyway. And then there was that permit you could get from the landowner on the upper Kalama that allowed you to fish on his property which was very good for late returning winter fish some of which were very nice size.
 

Salmo_g

Legend
Forum Supporter
Am I correct to remember a run of large steelhead that entered the Kalama and other SW Washington rivers in May and June, large fish as much as 20# and hot. What stock were they? Native, I presume. I snorkeled the east fork Lewis below Lucia Falls (?) and it was plugged with large fish. About the same time I started flyfishing in ‘68-‘69; never caught one over 10# but saw some that appeared much larger.
For most of their existance, fish hatcheries have kept the earliest returning fish as broodstock to ensure getting as many as necessary to operate the program. This led to run timings becoming earlier in the season than the natural wild runs. This is how the Chambers Creek hatchery winter steelhead came to peak in December and led to more hatchery summer steelhead returning in April, May, and June instead of the peak natural return month of July. When the hatchery summer steelhead programs were really large on some rivers and smolt survival rates were much higher, summer steelhead could be found occasionally as early as late January!, although February and March were far more common. So the earliest hatchery summer steelhead return timing had a significant overlap with the remant late wild winter steelhead returns. The principle difference of course is that the late winter steelhead spawned that spring, while those early summer runs held over in the river for nearly a year before they were ripe to spawn.

Now, about those large steelhead. WDG at the Washougal hatchery began in the mid-70s selecting 3-salt summer steelhead for broodstock with the intent of creating larger returning summer steelhead. (Most Skamania type summer steelhead return to freshwater as 2-salt fish and generally weigh 8 pounds.) The experiment worked, and larger hatchery summer steelhead returned in the late 70s and early 80s to the rivers that received their hatchery steelhead fingerlings from the Skamania hatchery. A lot of 17 and 18 pound 3-salt, and allegedly some 20 pound, summer steelhead showed up in the Washougal, EF Lewis, Kalama, and Cowlitz Rivers for a few years. I don't know this for a fact, but what I was told regarding discontinuing that program is that the smolt to adult survival rate was lower when only 3-salt returns were used as broodstock. That makes a certain amount of sense in that for each year spent in the ocean, more fish are lost to natural mortality factors. However, as fish get older and larger, the mortality rate declines, which also makes sense. The other part of the story is that whomever the hatchery management decider was, decided that the programs should try to mimic the natural populations instead of creating frankenfsih. About that same time, most hatcheries also began taking their broodstock from across the natural timing spread instead of taking only from the earliest returns. So I give that part of the explanation some credence. The obvious exception was to continue the early timing of the Chambers Creek hatchery winter fish because it became obvious that by coincidence the Department had created a timing separation between hatchery winter steelhead and wild winter steelhead and that this was a good thing, genetically, ecologically, and in just about every way one could measure.

Again, about snorkeling at Lucia Falls. In May at the base of the falls one might reasonably observe early summer steelhead that would average 8 pounds, except in the years when there was more than a normal distribution of 3-salt fish, co-mingled with some late timed winter steelhead that might average about 12 pounds in those days, with some members of that population being in the teens and 20+ pound range. So there you have it; well, most of it anyway.
 

SilverFly

Life of the Party
Forum Supporter
On the Washougal we referred to them as "Springers" because they arrived around the same time as spring chinook they I imagine were intercepted by gillnets in greater numbers that other Summer runs, and because they were in the river for so long, often in the biggest pools of the most remote sections of river they were heavily poached and lastly, because they were the first arriving summer runs they were heavily preyed upon by hatchery programs.

They are the fish that made Portland area anglers fish 9wts and reels with 300 yards of backing. pretty rare these days.

Washougal springers were they closest thing to a tropical flats, or pelagic species that I had encountered before I knew what that comparison meant.
 
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