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Chinook Fishing to Resume at Ice Harbor, Little Goose Dams by Staff Lewiston Tribune, May 20, 2023

Washington will reopen spring chinook fishing on the Snake River near Little Goose and Ice Harbor dams next week.

The Little Goose area is open Tuesdays and Fridays and the Ice Harbor area is open Wednesdays and Thursdays. Anglers can catch as many as four hatchery spring chinook but only one of them can be an adult fish.

The two fishing seasons were shuttered earlier this month after the spring chinook run failed to materialize. But the fish made a late surge last week.

Washington and Oregon also reopened spring chinook fishing on the parts of the lower and middle sections of the Columbia River in a six-day season that started Friday.

Even with the late push, the run is expected to be significantly smaller than the preseason forecast of nearly 200,000 springers bound for tributaries of the Columbia River upstream of Bonneville Dam. On Monday, state, tribal and federal fisheries managers downgraded that forecast to 139,000.

The Warm Springs, Yakama, Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes closed their season in Zone 6 of the Columbia River on Thursday. According to a report in the Yakima Herald-Republic, the tribes have caught nearly 10,000 spring chinook there, which is just shy of their quota.

Washington and Oregon have thousands of fish remaining on their catch quota, allowing them to reopen fisheries.

On Thursday, Idaho reduced the bag limit on the lower Salmon and Little Salmon rivers to one adult hatchery fish per day because of lower than expected returns to the Rapid River hatchery.