Kingfisherman,
I hope I can answer a few of your questions below. One thought I had though was to see if you can do some type of a search at the Seattle times regarding the Ballard Locks. I would guess it was about 1 year or so ago that their was a great story about the creation of the locks with incredible photos and very detailed.
The runs in the Cedar are not doing great, with the exception of Lake WA Cutthroat and resident Rainbows. My understanding is that when the Cedar was diverted into the lake that what ever those fish were using to home in on when returning to the Cedar in the past, they now smelled comming out of the ballard locks. This is how they changed there course to go into the Cedar.
Like I said before, personaly, I would be very cautious to call all the Chinook that spawn in the Cedar, Wild Native Cedar River Chinook, Simply because I think Issaquah Hatchery Chinook stray at a fairly high rate in that system, along with Coho from both Elliot net pens and Iss hatchery. An interesting side note is that this year is the first year we will see ad-clipped Chinook returning back to Issaquah Cr. as 3 year olds. It will not be the majority of the run but it will show that some of the fish in the Cedar may be Issaquah fish.
So the fish runs, Like I said are not doing all that hot. Last year (2001) was the first in atleast the 5 years that I have been around that we had just over 1000 Chinook return, but 1999, was just 200-300. The minimum escapement for that system is 3000 fish, although I would imagine that with the opening of the upper watershed that it would go up some.
The Stealhead are in the same boat but much worse, I think in 2000 the had less then 100 fish return, these are based on counts at the Ballard locks and river surveys. I do not know enough about these fish to throw out many suggestions, but I have caught resident Rainbows in the lake that a trained biologist had a hard time telling the difference between migrating Stealhead smolts that are ~8 inches long, could we be catching the smolts on ther way out? Of course Hershals gone but we all know that there are plenty of others out there.
The Coho run is stable, just not real large, while doing stream surveys this pasy fall, 2001, I found a spawned out unclipped Coho buck in early Janurary in a tributary to the Cedar that weighed 22.5 pounds, my assumption is that in the salt, he would have went closer to 28-30? They are not all that big, avg 4-8 but he was imperessive.
Hope this helps and check out that article, it was very informitive, I will see if I can find it too.

NEN