July 12, 2014 — The sockeye salmon tally this year at the lower Columbia River’s Bonneville Dam on Tuesday, July 8, set a record for any season since the construction of the dam was completed in 1938 and the counts began.
Mid-summer sockeye spawners counted passing Bonneville through Tuesday totaled 526,367, and counting.
The record for an entire season was a 515,673 fish count in 2012.
Another 12,858 sockeye were counted passing the dam Wednesday to up the record to 539,225.
Fishery officials as of Monday estimated that the 2014 sockeye return to the mouth of the Columbia River will total more than 560,000 fish. That forecast is up, based largely on dam counts, from a preseason estimate of 347,000 sockeye.
“If we had updated the runs today, they would have been higher,” the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission’s Stuart Ellis told the Columbia River Compact Wednesday. Ellis chairs the Technical Advisory Committee, a panel of federal, state and tribal fishery experts that makes predictions, and updates predictions, of salmon and steelhead returns to the Columbia/Snake river system.
“We would probably be looking at a sockeye run at the 600,000 level” if recent days counts were taken into account, Ellis told the Compact’s Oregon and Washington members. The Compact, made up of representatives of the Oregon and Washington department of fish and wildlife directors, sets commercial fishing seasons on the mainstem Columbia River where it represents the two states’ border.