Northwest Fishing Reports

The cowlitz hatchery will end there winter run steelie program. They will do this with the hopes to bring the river back to a natural state. If Im not mistaken there was not a steelie run in this river until the hatchery program. I could be wrong though. Anyhow I read the local cowlitz paper this weekend to find out this info. Ill see if I can pull up some kind of link and post the info. This is effective now. The smolt are not going back into the river this year or any other years till 2019. So because of no smolt this year we will get hatchery fish for what 2-4 years? with every year declining. Then if they put smolt in in 2019 we will not get a winter steelie run till 2021 at least. No more glow balling at the cowlitz for winter steelies. GRRRRRRRRRRR

Found some links.

http://www.chronline.com/news/article_8 ... 03286.html

http://www.tdn.com/news/local/article_4 ... 03286.html

Note these are not the same articals I had read this weekend.

I had not seen that they are not touching the lower cowlitz hachery runs. We will still have glow balling. Just not as many fish will be comming up river.

Every NATIVE fish in that river died long ago. The "wild" fish are all hatchery offspring.

No point going into depth about them putting fewer fish in there. I'll just sum it up with LAME

This is just one of the steps Tacoma Power is using to justify with the public the dam they intend to put on the Cow. They are going to ruin a very important fishery instead of pulling from a columbia river dam!!!!!!!

VERY LAME....and that will just put even more pressure on other rivers.

Yup, it's just all around a LAME idea. As if we need more dams around these parts. They can't even seem to keep up some of the ones we already have (howard hansen for example). How much money is that going to take away from the local economy down there? Hmmmm...

Why the hell did i spend $25 to help hatcherys,I wanna know where all that money is goin?Did gregoire steal it or is it how they think they can fix our state deficit by lying saying it will help hatcherys when it's really goin for someones new car or mansion?I think we should start asking WDFW what happened to our money!![cursing]

Once in a great while i fish the cowlitz in packwood thats where the native fish used to spawn when my grandpa bought the property in aug.22,1962.

They shouldn't quit anything, I think they should put more in the river better than ever!They just got paid!!!!

okay again I apologise if my reply sound rude. but I am a certified fisheries management tech yes most of you are right when u say the widl fish have died off long ago yes as soon as hatchery fish started to spawn with wild fish they crossed their dna and they became a non native fish but there are still wild fish . those fish who made it long enough to spawn natuarlly are wide fish but the native strains are so intermixed now that there are really no true natives left. the other question to answer is what historically ran in those southern rivers historically it was cutthroat costal rainbows aka steelhead and chinook and sockeye and coho. for there plan to work right is going to be the army core of enginers and the communites working to together to not pollute or flood out there spawning grounds.....