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Here we are in mid-February, a couple weeks into the blackmouth opening in the Salish Sea, and WDFW is opening up recreational fishing for spring (winter?) Chinook running in the Columbia [see today’s email announcement below]. This makes me wonder where the southern residents are at the moment and what the run timing looks like for California Rivers, coastal OR rivers, and the Fraser. Why in the world isn’t a simple Gantt diagram for this famous phenomena!?
This is the first time I’ve gotten a sense of when the spring run gets going and it’s earlier than I expected. Yesterday Sam Wasser showed us some plots that suggest that southern residents are about as well fed as they are all summer when they first show up in ~June. That got me wondering whether Fred Felleman is right — that their main source of annual sustenance is the really big, oily spring Chinook destined for the highest parts of the biggest river systems (and fisher’s dinner tables, now).
WDFW NEWS RELEASE
February 12, 2009
Contact: WDFW Region 5 Office, (360) 906-6708Columbia River spring chinook season reflects projection of strong runs
OLYMPIA – Anglers will be able to fish for spring chinook salmon from the mouth of the Columbia River to Bonneville Dam through mid-April under initial seasons adopted Wednesday, Feb. 11, by fishery managers from Washington and Oregon. Anticipating a strong run of spring chinook to the upper Columbia River and improved returns to the Willamette, the two states agreed to provide significantly more days of fishing – particularly below Hayden Island – than last year.
According to the pre-season forecast, nearly 300,000 upriver spring chinook are expected to enter the Columbia River this year, which would make this year’s return the third highest since 1977. An additional 37,000 “springers” are also expected to return to the Willamette River, up from 27,000 last year.
“This is shaping up to be a very good year for spring chinook fishing in the Columbia River,” said Cindy LeFleur, Columbia River policy coordinator for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). “The first fish have just begun to arrive, and we hope to see a lot more of them in the months ahead.”
Below Hayden Island, the new season provides 30 days of spring chinook fishing in March and April, compared to just 12 days last year. During those two months, anglers also will have 39 days – up from 36 days last year – to catch and retain spring chinook from Hayden Island upriver to Bonneville Dam.
LeFleur noted that the fishery could extend beyond April, but that late-season regulations have not been set because of differences between the fish and wildlife commissions of Washington and Oregon over how to allocate the catch.
In March and April, Columbia River anglers will be able to fish for spring chinook salmon at the following locations and times:
* West power lines on Hayden Island downstream to Buoy 10: Seven days per week from March 1-15. Beginning March 16 through April 18, fishing will be limited to three days per week, Thursdays through Saturdays.
* West power lines on Hayden Island to Bonneville Dam: Seven days per week from March 1-22. Beginning March 23 through April 22, fishing will be limited to four days per week, Wednesday through Saturday.
* Tower Island power lines above Bonneville Dam to McNary Dam: Seven days per week from March 16 through April 30. The Washington and Oregon bank fishery will also be open from Bonneville Dam upstream to the Tower Island power lines.Until March 1, the spring chinook fishing is open under regulations described in the 2008-09 Fishing in Washington rule pamphlet (good until April 30, 2009). Anglers fishing for spring chinook salmon may also retain shad and hatchery steelhead, as outlined in the rule pamphlet.
In all areas, anglers are required to release any chinook salmon not clearly marked as a hatchery-reared fish, since a portion of the wild upriver spring chinook run is protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. Unmarked steelhead must also be released. Hatchery fish can be identified by a clipped adipose fin with a healed scar.
Under a new rule approved by the Washington commission, anglers fishing below McNary Dam may retain two hatchery-reared adult salmon or steelhead (or one of each) per day. However, only one adult chinook salmon may be retained per day downstream from Bonneville Dam.
LeFleur noted that standing rules limit incidental mortality of wild spring chinook intercepted and released in all state fisheries – recreational and commercial – to 2.2 percent of the total run. “It’s essential that anglers observe the rules requiring the release of wild salmon and steelhead,” LeFleur said. “Our ability to continue these fisheries depends on it.”
Intro by Miles (Chip) Boothe
Over 600 vessels have been escorted by the Neah Bay tug since it first started operating in 1999; 6 involved throwing lines to a vessel in distress. This afternoon the legislature is looking at a new measure to fund the tug permanently (beyond the 1 year that Governor Gregoire recently promised) and transfer the burden of cost to the maritime shipping industry.
See Fred Felleman’s guest column in the Seattle Pi (Feb 4, 2009) [~40% of tankers calling on WA are single-hulled; WA has 5 refiners that process 9 billion gallons crude/yr;
Dan Doty: Slick Fixes for the Salish Sea – Restoring Natural Resources after Oil Spills
Prevention is important, but what happens if a spill occurs? Three types of responses:
Most spills are small. NRDA is WA compensation schedule ($1-100/Gal damages go into a fund that is used for restoration)
Bigger spills involve planning and preparation:
Restoration is the goal of this whole process. We need to invest in preparation to do a good job when a spill happens.
Evaluating Capacity to Respond to Large-scale Oil Spills in Puget Sound and the Georgia Basin, Jacqui Brown-Miller
Later this week the Washington Oil Spill Advisory Council will publish “Assessment of capacity in WA State to respond to large-scale marine oil spills.” This is a synopsis of the assessment of what to do in the first 48 hours after a ~50k barrel spill. The results of the study will likely guide upcoming policy revisions.
Response modes:
Results:
Looking to the Future – Training, Drills, and Exercises, David Sawicki
Dept of Ecology has a Spill Drill checklist that is aligned with the Northwest Area Contingency Plan and designed to test the functionality of the Incident Command System. Federally, there is National Preparedness for Response Plan document.
The present state: Incident Command System is probably best in the world
Future state: Increased focus on field activities (not incident command post where we are excellent)
We need to do this through workshops and coordinated training (leveraging proximal refineries and response organizations). We need to move past repetitive checklist 3-year cycle approach. “Many of us are ready for graduate school.” We also need to develop more realistic goals (only a mag 9 earthquake would cause some of the scenarios we train for…)
Panel discussion
Kathy Fletcher: Prevention is the most important thing we can do. Right now we have a 5cent/barrel tax that funds our prevention and response activities, but the revenue is unpredictable because if oil is shipped out of WA the tax is refunded. The Oil Spill Advisory Council needs to advise the legislature on ways to stabilize the revenue (though the Governor has suggested abolishing the Council itself). This March 24th will mark the 20th anniversary of the Exxon spill where lack of vigilance was the main reason the damage was so grave.
Richard Wright: Runs largest private, non-profit Marine Spill Response Company (4M barrel clean-up capacity, nationally??). WA State is very well prepared and we have an MOA with Burrard, a Canadian counterpart. A single phone call will access their full resources.
Linda Pilkey-Jarvis: possible big spills are from 10k barrels to ~3M barrels. We have gained rules in latest regulatory framework that make review of plans optimal, e.g. standards for skimmer efficiency equipment. We’ve pushed equipment caches to outer coast areas and San Juan Islands. Some companies are close to compliance, but many have a ways to go as we begin this 3 year process. Before plans are approved, we go into field to verify procedures and resources.
Dixon Landers
2002-2008 WACAP study ocused on high-elevation and remote systems with lakes as precipitation collectors. We weren’t supposed to inform fluxes to Puget Sound, but we may have discovered that the snow that melts into our inland sea starts out contaminated! Data sources are snow samples, sediment cores, fish samples, lichen, and water. We looked at broad suite of volatile organic compounds, metals, and nitrogen from the Arctic to Texas. In WA we sampled Olympic, Rainier, and N Cascades Parks (vegetation and snow only).
Results:
Marie Noel
PCBs are transported through the atmosphere in both gas and particulate phases. In Great Lakes and Baltic Sea, the majority of aquatic PCBs come from atmospheric transport. Transport from Asia to BC takes 2-10 days. One sampling site at Ucluelet as reference for Saturna Island samples (gas (86% of PCBs, 63% PBDEs), particulate (porportionally more heavy congeners), and rain phases). PCB heavy congeners dominated by tri and tetra; PBDEs by tetra, penta and deca.
PBDE deposition was higher than PCBs overall. PCBs about same between sites, suggesting global sources. ~50% of PBDEs are coming from local sources, and the increase above reference is mostly due to heavier PBDEs (tetra, penta, deca). The point of origin is 20% from Asia; no north American sources can account for the coastal deposition in BC.
2004 deposition mass: 3.5 kg PCB, 20 kg PBDE (BDE 209 makes of 56%)
Thomas Gries
We collected samples upstream of the southern boundary of the lower Duwamish clean up area and then compared with samples taken further downstream. Background: focus on Harbor Island and a cleanup site at river mile 4.8, site selection and future load inluenced by sediment transport model and analysis report:
Upstream sampling at 6/1oth max depth was chosen to avoid upstream transport by salt wedge, but downstream of most point-sources. Looked at 63 and 250 micon sediment size fractions. We saw high [PCB, dioxins, arsenic] in August, low in November and December. Suspended sediment PCB loading may be lower than predicted. Peak loading is associated with storm events.
Jeff Stern
Mapping C flow through the food web can help us understand trophic strucure and species interactions and ass feeding guilds and which species may be most at risk from bioaccumulation. Our model is a steady state partitioning (Arnot and Gobas, 2004; Condon, 2007) that uses Tim Essingtons trophic structure data, diet data from John Ruem (2006 UW thesis), and other parameters from many others. Essington’s data show that biomass and diet change dramatically with depth strata.
Our simplified model for the central basin of Puget Sound yields 9 out of 10 estimates for species or feeding guilds that are within factor of 2 of field measurements. We have almost no data for plankton and spiny dog fish in the central basin.
Results:
Simplified food web structure seems to do well in approximating carbon flows, so we believe we are accurately modeling transfer of PCBs, generally. You can add complexity to understand specific species’ situations. We also believe you’ll need different simplified model for each basin in the Salish Sea. That means we’ll need data from each basin! And it means that we’ll need more complicated (trans-basin) models for species with complex foraging behaviors, like killer whales.
N
long-term fate and bioaccumulation of PCBs in Puget Sound,
Models of contaminant kinetics:
Since 1990s, English sole PCBs have been increasing (but not in other species). This may be caused by on-going external loading. Our model predictions match measured biota within a factor of 2.
External loading in Puget Sound is probably non-point source from watersheds. Policies that control general toxics loading and runoff should help reduce PCB loading.
Scott: External loading is still a problem?! The orca community should be lobbying HARD for global PCB bans!
James Maroncelli
Phase 1 of toxic loadings to PS initiated in 2006 by a coalition (PSAT+WA Ecology+…): realized that air deposition was an important pathway
Phase 2: spring 07 $300k from EPA, $300 from Ecology TPA, $55k NOAA funded all programs (because we established a framework for project prioritzation)
Sources
Phase 3: hope to attain funding from national estuary, trying to align with action agenda, but didn’t want to wait in part because Norm Dix wanted to start fixing problems asap. Year 1 projects focused on analyzing surface runoff, sediments, biota, including $310k from WA legislature on atmospheric deposition (via PSP). First of these projects will report in June, 2009.
Phase 3, year 2: starting to use action agenda for guidance, PSP wanted an inventory of toxic chemicals by spring 2010 to inform second version of Action Agenda which is due in Sept 2010. Projects: 3-6 may be funded, proposals due to EPA March 1; Transferring responsibility for toxic loading to PSP science panel. Joel Baker says funding will be “pragmatic.” Decision process for potential Oct 2009 funding is to be more formal and rely on recommendations of PSP Science Panel.
