Those fish might have been summer chinook. I've been getting a lot of reports of incindental catches of these fish in the Snohomish and lower Skykomish. WDFW's hatchery between Startup and Goldbar is doing a good job of building this particular race of chinook back up. Remember you can't retain any of these fish although they are very often caught on a summer-run steelhead presentation. These chinook are beautiful, usually run from 10-25 lbs. They are a blast to catch but please relase with care! They don't spawn until the fall and can't take a bunch of abuse in June. If we could get WDFW to mark all their chinook we might make a case for a selective fishery on these fish. Unfortunately, from a management standpoint they get grouped with the fall chinook which aren't doing so well in this system. We need to get the tribes to agree to allow WDFW to mark all chinook then convince Curt Kramer that the summer chinook population is healthy enough(if it truely is)in the Skykomish to allow a selective fishery.

Gary Bee