RT,

I can’t answer all your questions, but this is one subject I can tell you that your number 1 suspicion and educated guess couldn’t be further off base.

First, why has the fishing on the Cowlitz gone gunnysack? For one thing, there are no viable wild, native stocks remaining that might be expected to exhibit some resilience as freshwater and ocean survivals fluctuate. Next, the salmon hatchery is over 30 years old and suffers from obsolesence. It produces smolts fraught with disease. Coupled with the recent period of low marine survival, adult production is miserable. The last two years, coho returns were good, due to high marine survival, not due to high smolt quality. Springer returns are up everywhere in the Columbia basin except the Cowlitz. Reason? Well, other basin hatcheries are turning out healthier smolts at a size closer to that of wild smolts. The Cowlitz is turning out smolts infected with BKD, IHN, and runs them through the cesspool of C. Shasta, a killer parisite that is abundant in the Cowlitz. The Cowlitz springer smolts are 2 to 3 times the size of wild smolts, yet their survival rate is dismal. WDFW doesn’t agree that rearing the smolts to the same size as wild smolts is a good idea. Yet, they raised the smolts to a smaller size during the 80s when return rates were much better. Let the facts speak for themselves. But Tacoma has suggested doing side by side experimental groups at two sizes and see which survives better.

Cowlitz steelhead returns are also dependent on nearly exclusively hatchery runs. Using genetically deficient Chambers Ck. stock and subjecting them to the Cowlitz disease mill just about guarantees poor returns unless ocean survival is exceptional. Last year, about 200 wild, native steelhead returned. That isn’t much, but you might like to know that their smolt to adult survival rate was three times that of the hatchery brats.

Now, as for the Cowlitz being the most historically productive river, what constitutes history for you? The Cowlitz was productive, but hardly a headline maker, until the hatcheries Tacoma built came on line in 1968. Prior to the hatcheries, the Cowlitz was just another productive river with good populations of wild salmon and steelhead. It was the early years of hatchery production, and the start up success that many hatcheries seem to enjoy, that put the Cowlitz on the map of headline sportfishing. As long as the hatchery succeeded and as long as ocean survivals were high, the built in deficiencies of the facilities and the concept of an all-hatchery supported fishery were effectively masked. It was a bomb waiting to go off. And it has. And we’re left with the pieces.

I cannot find anything indicating NMFS, WDFW, or Tacoma want to turn the Cowlitz into a native C&R fishery. Several things have happened. Here’s some of the story. After Tacoma completed the dams, they and WDFW found it impossible to collect and pass enough of the downstream migrating smolts to maintain natural salmon and steelhead production. In 1973 WDFW, NMFS, and USFWS agreed that Tacoma could mitigate the entire Cowlitz salmon and steelhead production through the hatchery system. After that, fish were no longer passed upstream for the purpose of maintaining production. Surplus hatchery fish were trucked upstream to Morton and Packwood to maintain some sportfishing opportunity. Any natural production that resulted was considered coincidental. In 1985 the state legislature passed a bill requiring WDFW to investigate the feasibility of restoring natural fish production above the dams. Lewis County was in the process of permitting and then building Cowlitz Falls Dam. The Friends of the Cowlitz negotiated an agreement with BPA, the purchaser of CFD energy, to provide fish passage at the new dam. They built the dam and installed juvenile fish collection facilities - that still need much improvement.

It happens that Tacoma’s operating license for Mayfield and Mossyrock dams expires next year. So Tacoma went through a relicensing proceeding over the last few years. FOC was much involved. And then during that process, lower Columbia River - including the Cowlitz - chinook, chum, and steelhead were listed as threatened under the ESA. As a consequence, neither Tacoma, NMFS, WDFW, nor any other party really has the choice of not trying to restore natural production of listed salmon and steelhead. The ESA is a federal law, and restoration, or recovery as it’s called, is required as a matter of law. Since restoration actions were planned and already under way, the ESA requirements have installed some side boards on actions, but haven’t made the kind of changes they would have if no restoration had been contemplated.

As for Tacoma’s new hydro license, there are some key points. First, the hatchery program will continue. Without a high quality hatchery, restoration isn’t possible. So Tacoma has agreed to completely renovate the salmon hatchery to a state of the art facility. The intent will be to have high water quality, low rearing densities, and smolts that will have much improved survival rates. The hatchery will not be as large as some parties wanted it to be. There are two reasons: 1) the Federal Power Act doesn’t require Tacoma to provide the fishing experience people have become accustomed to; 2) NMFS is required to place a limit on hatchery production that would work against recovery of listed fish.

Under the FPA, Tacoma is required to mitigate its project’s impacts on the fishery resources. Tacoma has agreed to a combination of hatchery and natural production (read fish passage here) that will result in as many salmon and steelhead being produced by the Cowlitz River basin as would be the case if Tacoma’s dams were not present at all. The future on the Cowlitz will indeed be different than the fishery of the past 30 years, which was 100% hatchery driven, and different still from the historical fishery before that, which was 100% wild stock. During the new license period Tacoma will provide new hatchery facilities and fish passage facilities to meet its mitigation and ESA obligations. Two things are likely in hatchery production. NMFS required a reduction in hatchery coho and fall chinook production to reduce impacts to wild fall chinook, which are listed. Hatchery winter steelhead production will also be reduced. Spring chinook production is increased, I believe, to assist restoration or recovery. Hatchery production may also be reduced in some phased sequence while all the renovation takes place. WDFW will maintain as much production as possible during the transition, but the details are not worked out.

As for opinions and ideas about what’s going on here, why not just verify? The web address for Tacoma is www.ci.tacoma.wa.us/Power/ The license settlement agreement is in there somewhere, and the facts are mostly available. I think much of the problem here is that people’s perceptions and expectations don’t line up with reality. You say that “ . . .it has been a top producer and fishing pressure absorber for better than half a century. It can support and produce large runs of hatchery fish for sportsmen - taking undue pressure off many other regional rivers.” First, 30 years isn’t half a century, but I get your drift. What made it a top producer? The world’s second largest fish hatchery, that’s what. And did the Cowlitz create that kind of fishing pressure, or did a very successful initial hatchery program create it? Major hatchery programs on other rivers have created such fishing zoos, and that is what seems to have happened on the Cowlitz as well. Your statement appears to support the notion that large hatcheries create the problems of overfishing that they often were intended to solve. I think it is not the job of any river system to absorb fishing pressure. It is the responsibility of fisheries management, like WDFW, to manage fishing so that it doesn’t jeopardize any population of fish.

I asked WDFW’s regional folks what fishing would have looked like in recent years if Tacoma had never built the Cowlitz dams and no one built or stocked any hatchery fish in the Cowlitz. The reply might surprise you. Most noticable, there would be no summer steelhead fishery. Summer runs were few in number before the hatchery program began in the early 70s. During the 90s, with no dams and no hatchery, based on predictions of natural fish production, there would have been no spring chinook or fall chinook fishing allowed. A modest coho fishery and modest winter steelhead fishery is what the experts predict would be available today, given the way environmental conditions are.

Tacoma’s mitigation obligation is to replace whatever its project impacts are, not what the sportfishing public would like it to be. Change in uncomfortable. And the fishery on the Cowlitz has already changed. The obsolete hatchery can no longer feed our expectations of excess. So under a new license, Tacoma will have to make good on the Cowlitz fishery, to equal or exceed official estimates of what production would be with no dams in place. The new hatchery is intended to produce healthier smolts, hopefully that will duplicate the survival rates of wild ones (tho that is probably unrealistic). And fish passage. If the facilities don’t meet NMFS requirements, Tacoma must keep spending until they meet passage goals, or everyone agrees that further improvements are unlikely. At that point, if the mitigation numbers aren’t being met, the balance can be provided with hatchery fish. As a contingency, the hatchery is being sized, according to Tacoma’s consultant, to provide the entire Cowlitz salmon and steelhead production, according to the mitigation goals in the license settlement.

It seems to me that the future on the Cowlitz looks a lot like the things you and many others on the BB express support for. A wild steelhead release is necessary for the successful recovery of native steelhead, primarily in the upper river. This shouldn’t pose much problem, since many of us are trying to get a statewide wild steelhead C&R policy anyway. If spring chinook production can be improved any time soon, you’ll have to release the wild ones, but you could still bonk the clipped ones - just the same as one the Columbia at this moment. And with coho mass marking, it doesn’t look like we’ll be keeping unmarked coho very often in the future anywhere in this state. And fall chinook, well I don’t know. I hear that the recovery of those is focused on the lower Cowlitz, below the dams. In order for that to be successful, commercial harvest rates will have to be adjusted to what wild stocks can tolerate, not the more abundant hatchery fall tules.

So, a long reply. But a lot has happened on the Cowlitz. It rose, it fell. Now, will it rise again? Not in the form anglers of the past 30 years were accustomed to. But possibly in a more sustainable way. Most of the harvest will be born by hatchery fish. But the presence of natural runs will provide some resilience that has been missing. So hatchery disease outbreaks and low ocean survival shouldn’t have as distressing impacts overall as has occurred lately.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.