The Osprey: British Columbia’s Dean River in 2013
Summer steelhead are now making their way up the Deschutes River, and within a couple of weeks will be on the reach just below the dams and within an hour or so drive from my house. It will be time for me to start making plans for a visit. This year’s run is looking to be pretty good, with as many as 10,000 fish passing over The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River each day— although only a small portion of those fish make the right-hand turn up the Deschutes.
Nevertheless, it looks to be working out to be a more than ample steelhead season on the Deschutes, and anglers fishing the lower river are doing very well. One constant, and curious, aspect of Deschutes steelhead is that even though there are four times as many hatchery fish in the river as wild fish, the wild fish provide most of the action. Our local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, reports that 85 percent of the Deschutes steelhead catch so far this year have been wild fish. The prevailing theory is that the wild steelhead are more active and aggressive, and therefore more likely to take a fly.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
• DEAN RIVER BY-CATCH
• FIRST NATIONS
• CALIFORNIA’S EEL RIVER
• SUSITNA RIVER DAMMED?
• SKEENA LNG THREAT
• AROUND THE CAMPFIRE
The fall Chinook salmon run on the lower river is also looking very good, and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife fish biologists are predicting that it may even be a record-breaker.
Big fish run years may give anglers and fish conservationists a sense of relief, or at least a feeling that things are not all that bad. But as Bob Hooton, author of our cover story on the state of affairs on the Dean River points out, people often forget that conditions change over time, sometimes radically and for a variety of causes.
Ocean conditions may smile on us periodically and produce lots of returning salmon and steelhead, but we can’t expect the ocean to do all our work for us. There are still plenty of factors conspiring to send those runs plummeting including overfishing, industrial development or just the thousand cuts by human impacts that wear down a salmon or steelhead river over time, as the stories in this issue of The Osprey point out.
Still, abundance of wild fish is an attainable goal, and I hope to experience some of it on the Deschutes in the weeks ahead.