Sea-claire,

Coho fishing can be very good this time of year at Riffe reservoir. I did it a couple years ago, and it was a lot of fun.

CFM took the path of a grouch with regard to some confusing regulatory disparities within the Cowlitz basin. I may ask his wife to make sure he gets to bed on time from now on, so that he might behave more charitably among his BB friends.

WDFW has stocked Riffe with surplus hatchery coho fry for years, and it made for a good land-locked recreational fishery. Since the reintroduction of salmon and steelhead above Cowlitz Falls Dam, and since Cowlitz Falls only collects about half the downstream migrating smolts, the rest end up in Riffe. As a result, it generally isn't necessary to stock Riffe with fish from the hatchery, since all the fish that Cowlitz Falls misses end up there.

WDFW regulations try to prevent the harvest of smolts in the upper Cowlitz and Scanewa for the obvious reason that those juvenile fish have a crack at making it to the ocean and becoming returning adult salmon. Unfortunately, Riffe has no passage facilities yet, and few fish successfully outmigrate from it. So Riffe becomes sort of a "Dead Sea" in migratory fish terms, but fish can rear successfully there. And it makes sense to allow the recreational fishery for them there since they have extremely little chance of outmigration and zero chance of becoming spawners.

Of course it seems weird. ESA listed chinook and steelhead do end up getting flushed into Riffe. One might ask what good it does to extend any ESA protection to them once they end up in Riffe. Actually, some of the chinook have been surprising little buggers. They are being flushed into Riffe during the spring, and are growing there during the summer, and then in August and September, some of them find the penstock openings at 200' of depth and pass through the turbines, and some of them survived and showed up at the Mayfield fish counting house.

In the next few years, Tacoma will likely be adding new fish passage facilities to Cowlitz Falls, Riffe, and or Mossyrock. Perhaps WDFW will have to further modify the fishing regulations to protect smolts that have a realistic chance of making a successful migration. If so, WDFW will likely keep Riffe stocked with something to take advantage of its rearing potential and to provide recreational fishing. It could be different, and it could result in an overall increase in fishing opportunity in the Cowlitz basin. I think it's safe to expect that as the reintroduction continues, there will be as many new questions as answers.

But it's cool! The upper Cowlitz is getting more fish than it has in decades, and many of them are naturally reproducing wild salmon and steelhead. Not your average fish and hydropower story.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.