By Pete Heley
With any luck, the first three-day halibut opener will feature decent ocean and bar conditions, since there are so few other angling options available for anglers who like to fish the ocean.
Right now, bottomfishing out of Charleston and seaperch angling along our ocean beaches is the hottest saltwater angling available. The South Jetty at the Umpqua River mouth continues to offer fair to good fishing for bottomfish and seaperch.
Spring Chinook fishing remains fairly slow most of the time on the Umpqua. It seems, however, that every once in a while there is a brief flurry that makes the anglers waiting for those infrequent bites more optimistic. It is kind of ironic that, recently, the best spring Chinook fishing on the Rogue has taken place in tidewater, yet on the Umpqua River, almost no spring Chinook are caught in tidewater.
Ocean crabbing continues to be fairly productive at depths between 25 and 40 feet, but the lower river crabbing still is fairly slow. Hard-working crabbers are getting some keepers, though.
Very few anglers have been targeting sturgeon and striped bass. The stripers should be getting ready to spawn and are extremely difficult to catch when actually spawning.
There seems to be plenty of planted trout left in the smaller lakes in the area and they are starting to bite a little better with slightly warmer water. Fishing for largemouth bass in most area lakes is approaching the immediate pre-spawn phase when they are in shallow water and still biting well. During the actual spawn, the female bass become more difficult to catch, although they sometimes bite well at night.
Of the almost 350 angling proposals that were initially under Oregon Deparmtment of Fish and Wildlife consideration, 134 have been adopted, subject to final approval. Some of them make lots of sense. For instance, a 25-fish daily limit on warmwater fish on the Snake River system would curb some serious abuses. Since the possession limit is almost always twice the daily limit, anglers could still fill their freezers — it would just take a few more days of serious fishing to do so.
Instead of allowing some waters to have a daily 25-fish kokanee limit, making the statewide limit five fish would make sense on many waters, especially on Lake Billy Chinook, whose kokanee population is much reduced from years past. Relaxing restrictions on the lake’s bull trout population would probably help since one biologist reported a couple years ago that the primary forage for the bull trout is now smaller bull trout.
It is kind of ironic that one proposal still alive involves having to turn in harvest tags before a new tag can be issued. It would seem, at least with angling tags, that giving away three drift boats each year, each worth thousands of dollars, would be incentive enough. Obviously, it isn’t and an angling tag return of 100 percent would definitely provide more accurate data.
One proposal that is almost certain to pass final muster is making the use of barbless hooks for sturgeon angling a statewide requirement. Currently, only the Columbia and Willamette rivers require barbless hooks for sturgeon fishing, but the trend has been to make as many regulations as possible consistent throughout Oregon. Management of all of the Columbia River fisheries are complicated by the sharing of the river with Washington and the chances of Washington agreeing to allow the use of barbed hooks by Columbia River sturgeon anglers would be very low.
Following a series of sport fishing regulation meetings, some of the 134 remaining angling proposals will undoubtedly fail to pass muster and will be dropped. A few new proposals may be adopted. The series of meetings begins in LaGrande on May 13 and ends on May 28 at Portland. All of the meetings are scheduled to run from 7 to 10 p.m. and the closest meetings take place in North Bend on May 19 at the North Bend Library; in Roseburg on May 20 at the Douglas County Library and in Newport on May 22 at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. These meetings will be last chance for concerned anglers to get in their “two cents’ worth.”
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