yesterday morning i walked down to the plum creek boat ramp on the snoqualmie. right at the bottom of the ramp were two filleted wild chinook salmon with one of the fillets still in the water. there were also four gutted and left hatchery steelhead laying around in the water. what an ugly way to start the season.(my 10lb hatchery chromer later in the day helped fix that)

what I am wondering is..... are there wild summer chinook in the snoqualmie? I thought that both the snoqualmie and sky got summer chinook but I have been told that there are no summer salmon on the snoqualmie at all. I doubt someone would go and buy them just to leave them there. The thing is that the salmon and steelhead looked like they were maybe two days dead and probably not from that morning. the ramp is also a put in and not usually a take out (unless you are in a sled)

If they got popped by the warden filleting wild kings and limiting on steelhead for two people the day before opening day...... they must have had the book thrown at them

did anyone see these fish?
can someone fill me in on the presence of a summer salmon run or not?

thanks

chappy did you see any other fish cought yesterday? was there alot of guys out fishing that river?

chappy, we launched there yesterday morning and that was the first thing I seen. As we left the launch there were a few more dead chinook not fillet a few yard's out of the launch. I to was wondering why a person would go to the trouble of fillet them and leave the fillet behind, I hope they did get busted.

I don't know what happened here but a lot of jet boaters need to put their boats in the water to flush the saltwater out of the engine. It is pretty convienient to clean/fillet the fish while you wait for the engine to warm up. I think there is a sign at lake crecsent that says flushing your boat at that ramp in not allowed. Any of you science guys see an environmental problem with flushing your motor in a lake or river? what about cleaning fish?

I don't think that is the case here,the snoqualmie is quite a ways from any salt-water.

There are chinook in the Sno. I don't know when they come in, I only see them in the fall, and don't usually fish it until then. The fillets in the water makes it sound like someone knew that what they were doing was wrong, and was throwing the evidence away. Sad. The chinook run in the Sno has been declining for years. Even in the ten years or so I have been fishing the river, I have noted the decline. Riffles that used to have spawning fish in the fall are now barren. I wish people would leave them alone.

Wooly bully -

The only significant problem I see with flushing boat motors is the damage that some careless boaters cause to a lot of launches. I can't count the number of times I've seen boaters power there boats onto the trailer or flush their motors and see huge plumes of material stirred up behind the boat. Obviously this isn't a problem on launches that are solid concrete or asphalt, but many of the launches on the chehalis and it's tribs aren't. I remember one guy running his sled on the trailer at the south montesano launch and it looked like he was dredging the river (I could just imagine the hole he was creating). There's no excuse for doing this and it costs a lot to repair the damage. Personally I'd rather see boaters launch their sled and run it around in the river enough to flush the motor if possible. From an environmental aspect, I really don't think there would be a problem since saltwater organisms won't last long in fresh water.

Thats to bad but it doesnt sound like poachers.
Poachers keep the fish they steal and if they were caught by the warden the fish would have been taken as evidence. Sounds more like the work of a radical eastside enviormental anti sportfishing group trying to make sportfisherman look bad. Boy I can almost see the lawsuit now "Sportfishing is wasteful and they kill native fish all rivers must be closed" or something like that.

The maxfield launch on the Sol Duc was being used by somebody flushing there motor and cleaning the re fish a couple of years ago.Did not relize what was going on untill I found a couple of ling cod heads!

so maybe they were salt water caught and just got cleaned there. but I couldnt understand all of the steelhead that were cleaned and then thrown back in(chromers too, i snagged one and thought about cooking it up for my dog but thought that it might do better to fertilize the streambed.

the fishing was ok on the snoqualmie on opening day. since the sun came out though, it has died down to nothing.

I saw 4 filleted native steelhead at the mouth of the sultan early sunday morning as well. Unfortunately there is no good explanation for this one.

With the late winter nates as abundant or more so than the summer runs in early june, and the bulk of the summer runs not arriving until late june. Why do we have a june 1st opener on this fishery. If Kurt kraemer is really as concerned about these fish as he claims to be he would push the opener back to the 10th or 15th when snow melt has pushed most of these fish down river. If these fish are too depressed to handle a C&R fishery in March and April. Then how can they a bait fishery in early june.

I'm sure many of you will disagree, but honestly ask yourself why. Do you like making these fish available to the poachers? With the exception of the opener is the fishing really that good the 1st week and a half of june anyways on the sky?

I think what probably happened was the people filleting knew they had illegal fish. They probably had a cooler they were throwing the fish into. Maybe they got spooked by either a car coming or a boat coming downstream that didn't look "right" to them. They freaked and tried throwing all the fillets in really fast, missing one. I doubt someone who was taking their time filleting would leave one behind. Plus, seeing that the fish were wild (I assume there's a closure on wild fish up there and it's out of season) they were probably in a hurry and screwed up missing a fillet.

I saw the same thing happen last year about the same time, I talked to a couple of guys that happened to be there when that happened and was told that some fisherman cleans out his freezer every year at the start of the season and throws the fish left over from the last season in the river so it goes to some good use. I think it would be better to limit what you can eat and not waste the fish at all . If you look at the fish you can tell they have been frozen.