Is it a monster coho or a chinook?

Thursday, November 13, 2003
By ALLEN THOMAS, Columbian staff writer

State fisheries biologists can't decide if a 32.3-pound salmon carcass found last week in the lower East Fork of the Lewis River is a coho or a chinook. If it's a coho, it is one of the largest ever handled.

Scale samples from the lunker have been sent to Olympia for analysis.

The gums are definitely white, the telltale sign of a coho. An examination of the pyloric caeca, a part of the stomach, also indicates it is a coho, said Joe Hymer, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist.

The shape of the snout looks like that of a coho.

But the spotting on the salmon tends to appear more like a fall chinook, and so does the tail.

The world-record coho salmon caught on sport gear was a 33-pound, 4-ounce fish caught in 1989 in the Salmon River of New York.

The Washington state freshwater coho record is 25.27 pounds from the Quinault River of the Olympic Peninsula in 2001. Washington's saltwater coho record is slightly larger, a 25.34-pound fish taken out of Sekiu in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.