It seems to me that this flooding may be too earlyl to hurt the coho and late retruning fall chinook, but what will it do to pinks, summer chums. and chinook that have already spwned?

Obviously on the West side rivers those fish that have already spawned are going to be affected. If I'm reading the USGS site correctly, the Queets rose 16 feet in 24 hours and the Hoh rose 14 feet. That is unbelievable - my expectation is that a lot of crap floated down the river and did some serious scouring of any redds that were already laid down. Awesome power and it isn't over yet.

Fortunately for the S rivers it will wash down alot of those rotten stinky *******s we call pinks.

It's a good thing the pink runs and escapements were huge because they dig the shallowest redds and are most affected by flood scour. A large proportion of pink salmon eggs have likely been scoured out by this high water event. The 2005 pink run will likely be moderate, at best, and perhaps lower than that. There are probably some pinks that haven't spawned yet, and that may benefit the next run, provided the rest of the winter we have freshets instead of floods.

Chinook are more resilient, since they dig deeper redds in larger gravel, but they will also be affected.

Not many coho will have spawned yet, so they're OK, for now.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

I'll tell ya what,..here on the Skagit the Pink run took a major blow with this one!!
Just driving around here, what Pinks are still alive are swiming around in the woods and finding themselves land-locked in small pond areas as the river drops. Real ugly up here!!! I'm told by the hatchery manager up here that the Silvers screamed in there as waters rose. Gonna be driving around to see what else I can find out today,..there's some new "State of the art" side spawning tribs that have been put in on the Skagit for Silvers and Chums to go in high water. Gonna check them out here in awhile.

Not sure how to post Pics here but if Bob or someone else can go to my sites reports page and post it here, theres a pic I took of the upper Skagit here yesterday morning at 10:00AM with the Skagit flowing down HWY 530 before the Rockport Bridge, and this pic was taken before the river crested at 7:00PM up-river here last night.