July 22nd column

[Pete Heley]

Ocean salmon fishing has been disappointing over the last week with almost no finclipped cohos taken. A few chinook salmon are caught each day near the bar, or along the jetty and this fishing should improve over the next several weeks as more chinooks enter the Umpqua River. Right now, salmon fishing is almost like playing the lottery, but a 40 pound chinook was taken on Friday near the Umpqua River Bar and a pink salmon, a very rare fish for our area, was also caught. There is a report coming out of Charleston that there are fair numbers of coho salmon south of Cape Arago, but there is no guarantee that they will be moving past the Umpqua River in the near future.

The hottest fishing over last weekend, for those boats that were able to get over the Umpqua River Bar, was for albacore tuna and some of the boats caught as many as ten tuna for each angler on board. On Saturday, very few boats were able to pursue the tuna, but Oregon Custom Charters came back with a good number of above average-sized tuna. Many of the tuna were taken in 58 degree water approximately 30 miles offshore, but some tuna were caught much closer in.

The fishing is getting tougher, but some early-bird perch anglers are still catching limits of “pinkfin” perch. Lots of fish have been caught from the Umpqua above Winchester Bay, but there are still fair numbers of perch left, but they seem to be getting more difficult to catch and seem to quit biting when boat traffic reaches a certain level - thus the advantage to fishing early.

Bottomfish pressure off the South Jetty and in the Triangle remains productive, but there has been very little fishing pressure directed at them as many anglers have switched over to other fish species (tuna, salmon and redtailed surfperch).

While sturgeon fishing remains slow, striped bass has been surprisingly productive for anglers willing to fish at night for them. Almost all the fishing pressure is taking place on the Smith River, ensuring that the Umpqua River stripers remain unpressured and very much overlooked.

Lakes that drain into the ocean, and thus have native and searun trout populations, are still fishing fairly well. Only the least-pressured lakes that receive trout plants are now providing much in the way of trout fishing. Anglers should consider using worms as bait, which will catch the lake’s warmwater fish species, or use two hooks - one small treble hook for such paste baits as Berkley Power Bait and a dropper for a nightcrawler. Use about half a nightcrawler when targeting perch and bluegills and a whole nightcrawler when trying to catch bass. Trout plants are scheduled to resume in late September with plants in Empire and Saunders lakes. Although they haven’t really caught on in Oregon yet, plastic or Gulp trout worms have accounted for some very large trout in California including a brown trout weighing more than 15 pounds from the Trinity River in northernmost California.

This Thursday (July 21st) there will be a meeting of the ODFW Inland Sport Fishing Advisory Committe in Roseburg at the ODFW Regional Office at 4192 North Umpqua Highway. Public input during the meeting is invited and a main topic of the meeting, which runs from 6 pm to 9 pm, is the status of the steelhead and smallmouth bass fisheries in the Umpqua Basin.

In a story that was well-covered by the Register Guard and picked up by many online and print publications, Rory Donoho, his son Shane and seven others were indicted in the single largest poaching incident in Oregon history. Amidst the heavy media coverage, there were some very interesting things brought out in the case. In the last several years, more than 300 deer and 12 elk were poached. In fact, these poachers were so successful that they were able to “stump” ODFW biologists who could not figure out why the deer populations were so depressed in the two areas the Donohos hunted, yet so healthy in other nearby areas. Between the father and son, they forfeited 19 rifles, 1,600 pounds of meat and lost their hunting privileges for life. In additon, the opening of deer hunting season will take on a whole different meaning for Rory and Shane as they will start 90 day jail sentences each October 1st for the next four years. Other punishments included fines totaling almost 10,000 dollars and 400 hours of community service work for Shane and since part of that community service work involves giving talks to hunting clubs, it could get interesting. I can not think of a single hunting club that would look kindly on anyone who illegally shot more than 300 deer and elk. For more information, either go online or look at archive issues of the Register Guard - it really is quite a story - and a sad one at that.