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Get ready guys they are screaming through the system. They are averaging 10 days from Bonn to LG dam now. About 2x as fast as normal. At these flows they can do the trip from LG to fishing areas in a week easy.
Theres been a good slug of ID bound fish over Bonn so far. Today has been great for ID pitt tags. Looking like the best day yet for Rapid River tags sitting at 30 tags as of 7pm.
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Normal trip is 12 days fish have been moving very fast the last three dams but did not move fast after the first 1000 day over Bonn. The trip took about 18 days. Do not expect fish to Riggins until after the 12th. Fish are two days behind the 2010 run first 1000 day that year over Granite was the 24th this year the 26th. Water is significantly higher this year than 2010 but may be warmer so we will see how fast they move. Warm weather hydrological forcast is for flows to increase 10000 for both rivers this week. Fishing started in 2010 on the 10th in Riggins and a few days earlier that year at White Bird on flows under 10000 cfs. Good fishing at Lewiston in three or four days or sooner and fish to big eddy by the 5th. Normal trip from Bonneville to Riggins on the early fish has been reported to be 30 days and about 18 from lower Granite first 600 day. In the last 10 years I have never seen it faster on the early run arrivel.
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Mean travel times are about average. Here is the link! http://www.cbr.washington.edu/dart/wrapp...esu_1.html
If you want to see how each year compares just click on one of the numbers and it will show you times for fish that came over the dam on certain days and how quickly their counterparts traveled from the same day (the red bracket around the asterisk).
Early run though, that's for sure. Last year I know a fish was caught 20 miles upriver from Kooskia the 3rd week of May and I'm pretty sure there will be fish closer to me well before that this year.
P.S. Even if the water comes up 10 kcfs, that still does not put either river in their real "high" mode where fish can't pass certain areas. They are just going to keep swimming!
Bring on the fish!
GL and TL
Blitz
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The long term ave for the Bonn to LG trip is 20 days. The 2010 time was around 18 days for the early portion of the run. Speed picked up in May. The majority right now are doing it in around 9 days
There are enough fish over LG that there are fish in Riggans now or will be within a day or two. Not big numbers, but I expect a hatchery return pretty soon.
I agree fishing wont be very good till 12 or later, there will be catchable numbers there within a week
By my math theres over 1500 clearwater adults and 1800 RR adults over LG todate.
we are about same number of adults as 2010 @ LG this yr 5536 vs 5072...and ID had a very big run in 2010 RR alone had over 1500 tags over bonn~ 78k fish so 2010 isnt a good yr to compare with.
I dont think we will get those numbers this yr. It is looking good to get what was predicted pre season though.
I know when Im going
better enjoy it this year cuz based on jack counts so far next years gunna suk
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Your correct long term season average passage time is 14.16 days, 15 days this year....until about a week ago. I was speaking for this recent time period. Which appears to be occuring sooner this year
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Fish ate already being caught in the confluence in Lewiston.
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Pitt tags say ID fish had a really good passage day at Bonn today. A couple more days and we should have enough fish insystem to maintain preseason fishing quota predictions.
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Good information. The 2010 run was huge and included in low water a two week gap at Riggins below the little Salmon from the 15th with very few fish being caught other than the next four good days when those fish passed through the LSalmon which was over the 18th. The reason for the complete stoppage of the fish was perplexing with no high water according to my journal and consistant daily numbers over Lower Granite for the entire time frame. I personally love the prospect of having fish in the river before the high water for the first time in five years.
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Looking better everyday! Can't wait to wet a line! 17,045 over Bonneville yesterday. 332 pit tagged fish for Rapid River over Bonneville so far, that translates into 16,600 Rapid River fish over bonneville to date, which is better than the early timing run prediction. Clearwater basin has 444 pit tagged fish over bonneville which translates into 15,096 clearwater fish over bonneville to date, also ahead of the early timing run prediction. This is based on an email Joe Dupont sent out on the 23rd and the number of PIT Tagged fish over by that date which translated into about 1 PIT Tagged fish for Rapid River equals ~50 fish and Clearwater Basin was about 1 to ~34 ratio. I have attached the prediction sheet in the the attachments below for all to see. On another note, I don't think the water is going to really get that high this year. For example Lolo Pass is at 42% of average with a snow water equivalent (you can think of this in terms of inches of rain, but it will not come off all at once) is at 9 inches. It lost an inch of that yesterday. Snow packs are low and I think "high water" will be a short one this year and will never exceed the barriers we can see for both the clearwater by Orofino and the Salmon at Devil's Slide.
Bring on the salmon!!!
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Blitz disreguard my pm I didnt see that the counts were based on tags thru the 23rd. My bad
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Phutch30,
I don't like the ptagis site, it's super slow. I use CBR DART which loads A LOT FASTER!!!! The ptagis site also has 332 fish over so far, so I don't know where you got 405 from. Also, I rounded a bit to 2% tagged for Rapid River which can make a difference, but it is about the same. So using 1.92% it is 52 fish to 1 tagged which would mean 17,264 fish vs the 16,600 I said before. Here is the DART site:
http://www.cbr.washington.edu/dart/query...syr_detail
Anyways, they are coming!
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[font "Times New Roman"][size 3][/size][/font][size 3][font "Calibri"]It was me, I usually use dart, but they updated the pitagis site and Istarted using it. But, while trying to reconcile your tag count with mine I found pitagis wasn’t removing the double counts (fall back) on a pile of tags which is where the extra tags count came from[/font][/size]
[font "Times New Roman"][size 3][/size][/font]
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Nearly every year the early fish start out slow as they did between the 8 dams. Also nearly every year there is a high water event that almost stop the fish during a week of their migration. During normal flows the fish usually make the passage in 12 days from Bonneville to Lower Granite which is pretty darn fast. For the rest of this year they should maintain that pace given the low water conditions. The numbers yesterday continue to impress.
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For those of you who aren't on the weekly mailing list for the Chinook Update by Joe Dupont here it is! I've attached the photos that he had in the email. All really good news!
"
Hi everybody, it is time for the Clearwater Region’s weekly Chinook update (4/29/15).
This will be fun update to give because I have lots of good news for you. Since my last e-mail, the Chinook Salmon have continued to poor over Bonneville Dam. I was worried it would peak and quickly drop off, but that is not the case. Consequently, our estimate for the number of adult hatchery fish that will eventually make it to Idaho has only gone up. If you look at the table below (focus on the last two columns) you will see that we are projecting an overall harvest share in the Clearwater River basin somewhere between 4,343 and 10,771 adult fish, between 7,020 and 13,736 for the Rapid River run, and from about 1,000 to 2,000 fish for Hells Canyon. Just so you all are aware of why there is a large range in these estimates, it is because we still aren’t certain whether the run has an early timing or average timing. If the run is early, we would expect over 80% of the fish to have passed over Bonneville Dam by now, whereas if the run has an average timing only around 50% of the run would have passed over Bonneville by now. There are some things that make me think the run isn’t an early timing run. First of all, the Jacks destined for Idaho really haven’t started showing up. If the run had an early timing we would expect to have seen more by now. The other reason is as the run gets near the end, the number of fish passing over Bonneville that are destined for Idaho should start dropping off. The Idaho bound fish are still coming over strong. Regardless of where we end up, I can tell you that there is going to be a lot of fish out there to catch, and it should be a great season.
As you all know, last weekend was the Salmon opener in the Clearwater Region; and we saw people fishing the Clearwater River from Lewiston up past Orofino and the Snake River below Hells Canyon Dam. As expected, catch rates were low as the fish were just getting here, but some people caught fish. All the fish we documented being caught were around Lewiston. Based on our creel survey, we estimated 16 adult fish were harvested. We measured one fish at 40 inches long and heard of another that was pushing 30 pounds. By this weekend there should be 10 times as many fish in Idaho as we saw during the opener, and the fishing should be much better. I wouldn’t surprise me if this weekend people catch salmon in the Clearwater River upstream to Orofino and in the Snake River below Hells Canyon Dam. Those of you who like to fish the Rapid River run may have to wait another week or two before the fish start arriving in catchable numbers.
The table below will be of interest to many of you. It shows how many adult fish were harvested in the Clearwater River basin and where they were caught. So, if you look at the table you will see that we estimated 16 fish were harvested in section 1 (the bottom of the table tells where section 1 is) during the opening weekend. Each week we will updates this table. If you like to fish the Clearwater, one thing to pay attention to is the section in blue. This tells what percent of the harvest share is allocated to each river section and how many fish remain to be harvested before we will close down that section of river. In case you were wondering, these allocations were developed by anglers in an effort to fairly distribute harvest throughout the different communities in the Clearwater basin. As fish start being harvested from the Rapid River run, I will add a table that shows how many of these fish are being caught, where they are being caught, and how close we are getting to our overall harvest share. Some of you may have noticed that I put 5,000 adult fish in the table below as the harvest share for the Clearwater. This is just what I think is a conservative estimate that I used for a starter. This number will change and get more precise as we better understand just how many fish will make it to Idaho.
I hope you are all getting as excited as I am about this Chinook run. My excitement certainly got the best of me as I went out and bought a new rod and have started loading up on tackle. Good luck fishing. "
Joe DuPont
Clearwater Region Fishery Manager
Idaho Department of Fish and Game
3316 16th Street
Lewiston, Idaho 83501
All really good news. It looks like it's time to wet some lines. Another 3k fish passed over LGR yesterday bringing the ytd total to just over 10k fish above LGR and another 11k over Bonneville and 17k the day before that so we got good numbers coming up! It would be awesome if this turns out to be a much bigger run than the forecast from back in the winter time. It looks like we will beat that especially if Joe is right about the Idaho fish numbers not slowing at Bonneville yet making this closer to an average timed run, but just big enough to get all these numbers we are seeing so far! I think this run is very comparable so far to the 2010 run as far as size goes and water conditions will be about the same if not a little lower than that year, so fish might push into the upper systems a bit quicker.
GL and TL
Blitz
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blitzfish,
Any way you could give a link on how to sign up for the chinook update/ newsletter? I would love to get that information
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Ditto on the link.
Thanks for the great information!
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I emailed Joe DuPont himself and asked to be put on it. I would just do that.
(joe.dupont@idfg.idaho.gov)
Blitz
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Thanks for the email address.
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Did the run peak? Tapered off pretty quick the last couple days. If it did, we are hurting for jacks.
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Has anyone been fishing? I'm done watching the computer screen I want to watch my line get wet
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