Meager chinook run leaves fishing industry high and dry

PORTLAND — Fertilizer salesman Rex Harke had planned to take 12 of his most loyal clients on a salmon-fishing expedition down the Columbia River this week.

Usually at this time, the spring chinook are charging up the river in the tens of thousands, heading from the Pacific Ocean to their spawning beds.

But in a phenomenon that has puzzled environmentalists and government biologists, this season the fish have failed to appear. The low numbers prompted officials to halt sport and commercial fishing on the river — and Harke reluctantly called his guide to cancel.

It was one of 57 cancellations that Clancy Holt, the president of the Sport Fishing Guides of Washington and an avid salmon fisherman, said he received in the three weeks since the closure was announced last month.

In all, he has returned $10,000 in deposits to clients such as Harke, whose group was expecting to fly in from Colorado, California and Washington.

In the past 10 days, Charan Sandhu, the manager of the Kalama River Inn on the Washington side of the river has gotten 65 cancellations, mostly from fishermen, he said.

The economic impact of the closure is hitting the fishing industry hard, but its ripple effect is being felt in communities up and down the river, said Liz Hamilton, executive director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association. She estimates the region will lose up to $10 million as a result of the closure.

"We call it the 'c' word — closure," Hamilton said. "It just puts a black cloud over the area that is very hard to overcome."

Fishing-tackle manufacturers are especially affected.

In February, when fishery managers were predicting a high run, salmon lures were selling by the grocery bag — hundreds at a time, said Buzz Ramsey, the regional sales manager of Luhr Jensen & Sons, the country's largest manufacturer of salmon lures.

The company laid off five employees after sales fell 7 percent compared with the same time last year. The company's most popular lure, the multicolored Kwikfish, is down 15 percent, he said.

"When there's no season, as a sales manager, there's nothing I can do. I'm dead in the water," he said.

This week, Oregon's and Washington's fish and wildlife departments are expected to slash their forecast for spring chinook entering the mouth of the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean to about 80,000, one-third of the 254,000 they had initially predicted.

So far, about 50,000 fish have been counted at Bonneville Dam, east of Portland. One year ago at the same spot, more than 128,000 were counted.

"We don't have any good theories right now," said Bill Tweit of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, who is a representative on the Columbia River Compact.

"There is an explanation, but it's going to take us quite some time to unravel what it is."

Curt Melcher, who manages the Columbia River and ocean salmon fisheries for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, cautioned that the low returns should be compared with 1995, the worst year on record, when just 10,000 spring chinook were counted.

"I think we are concerned; there's no doubt about that. But until we gather the final information and try to tease out what the cause of this apparent shortfall is, we're certainly not going to declare the end of the world," he said.

What worries fishing guide Holt the most is how the closure will affect businesses next year and the year after.

"All these groups will either be very reluctant to book a spring trip with us again — or else will not book at all. They'll go and book their trip in a place where they know they can fish," he said.