WENATCHEE — Eager with anticipation, Jaime Hernandez and Roman Dolozycki put their boat at the Riverfront Park boat launch Saturday.

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“We heard it's supposed to be good this year. Sockeye, coho, all kinds of good stuff,” said Dolozycki, of Leavenworth. At 11 a.m., the two may have been getting at late start on the Columbia River. Most other fishermen had started at dawn and had left already. But they were optimistic.

“We’ve got wriggle worms, Superbait and canned tuna. It has to be in oil,” said Hernandez, of Cashmere, describing the bait they would use to catch a big salmon.

Fishing boats have been plentiful in the morning hours since the Upper Columbia summer salmon season opened July 1.

News of an unusually large run of spring chinook making its way up the Columbia to spawn in the Wenatchee and other tributaries has fishermen excited with good reason. Fish counts at the Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia 40 miles east of Portland, Ore., reported 152,000 spring chinook, nearly double the 81,000 fish counted last year. The spring chinook run ended June 15.

Spring chinook are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act. But summer run salmon have continued to pour over the dam at a rate of about 2,500 a day. Projections call for a run of more than 52,000 summer chinook to make its way up the Columbia this season, well above last year’s 37,000, recently wrote Dave Graybill, an outdoors columnist for The World.

Sockeye run predictions are even more impressive. Only 26,000 sockeye returned to the Columbia last year. This year, more than 123,000 have already been counted at the Bonneville Dam headed to Wenatchee and Washington Fish and Wildlife officials increased their season forecast from 75,000 to 210,000 sockeye. Fish biologists have said they are at a loss why the run is so large, particularly at a time when California and Oregon salmon runs are disastrously low.

But it takes a while for fish to make their way more than 400 river miles upstream. Graybill predicted the season would start slow and both fish and fishermen will have to battle high water due to heavy winter snowfall and a cool spring for another month.

Cashmere fisherman Bob Shelton said fishing was slow on the Columbia all last week. But he was happy with the way Saturday was going. Shelton and Andy Hendrickson held up two 20-pound chinook as proof.

“We gotta catch another one for Erik,” Shelton yelled from his boat trolling near Walla Walla Point Park. Shelton’s son Erik was the third man in the boat.

Rich Denu and Mark Smith, both of Tacoma, were pulling their boat out of the water at the Riverfront Park launch when Dolozycki and Hernandez were putting in. Denu said they’d been out since 5:30 a.m. and hadn’t caught anything.

“We saw people with some pretty good size salmon, but they were locals. We’ve never fished here before,” Denu said. “We heard it was going to be pretty good. And I think it was on a fish-to-boat ration,” said Smith. “But we’re still checking the river
out. We’ll be back.”

Chris and Nancy Randall were fishing from the shore near Walla Walla Point Park. From Eatonville, they said they spent the morning lake fishing for bass near Coulee Dam, stopped to salmon fish the Columbia at noon and will probably try trout fishing on the Cle Elum River on the way home. For them, fishing is a good way to get out in nature and bounce around the state while they have a little free time. Catching fish is secondary, Chris said.

“We lived in Cashmere next to the Wenatchee River for years and never fished at all,” he said. “We had to move away to come back here and fish.”

Rick Steigmeyer: 664-7151
steigmeyer@wenworld.com