Big Return For Steelhead

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Story Published: Nov 8, 2009 at 10:48 PM PDT

By Holly Zuluaga

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COLUMBIA BASIN--It's been a slow start to the winter steelhead run.

There's lots of fish, but warm weather is keeping them from getting hooked.

It's a great time to be a fisherman.

“It's really exciting when you see those numbers come up and I mean your heart races. I'm like a child, a kid in a candy store,” fisherman Katahdin Cook said.

The number of hatchery steelhead returning to the Columbia, Snake, Yakima and surrounding rivers is huge.

Fishermen are allowed to catch hatchery steelhead, but have to let the wild ones go.

“Right now over Bonneville Dam which is the main dam we watch is about 602,000 yesterday when I looked which is one of the biggest runs we've had in years, but those fish aren't all ending up on these fishermen's poles,” Katahdin Cook said.

Katahdin Cook and his brother-in-law told me the fish weren't biting when they started fishing a month ago, but now it's picking up.

“It was really slow I think the main thing is the fish were they came in huge numbers, it was just too warm,” Katahdin Cook said.

As the weather cools down more fisherman will be catching steelhead and The Department of Fish and Wildlife is pushing for it.

In fact, fish and wildlife upped the limit of steelhead you can catch to 5 in the Snake River.

That's to protect the wild fish and keep them from spawning with the hatchery steelhead.

“The wild and the hatchery will spawn together so they realized that their might not be any wild fish left after that and if that happens year after year the wild fish that we think are wild even if they don't have their fin clipped their going to be hatchery fish that look wild,” Katahdin Cook said.

Cook and his brother-in-law use to do catch and release, but this year they're keeping the steelhead, doing their part to help harvest the hatchery fish and keep the wild ones coming back.

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