Outdoors

Willamette Valley fishing forecast: Lots of silver and chrome

After an enjoyable period of early fall weather, things are about to change. 

The possibility of an extended period of rain, generated by a building atmospheric river out over the Pacific, has popped up in our forecast. If it continues to build, the moderate storm, with predicted periods of heavy rainfall, could hit the central coast when you receive your weekly edition of The Chronicle. 

River levels on coastal rivers will rise, and the first wave of coho and fall chinook salmon will swim out of the coastal bays and into lower river segments up and down the Oregon coast. 

To the north the Alsea, and closer to home, the Siuslaw and Umpqua rivers, will all gain volume, likely enough to make fishing the lower reaches of many coastal rivers a good prospect going into the weekend. It has been an excellent salmon season on the ocean and bays, so I expect the upriver spawning run to be one of the strongest in recent years. 

Bank anglers should concentrate on the deeper holes for chinook, where I prefer natural baits of either cured salmon eggs, fresh sand shrimp, or a cocktail of both, fished deep under a bobber or back bounced from a drift boat. 

For coho in the river, a spinner or twitching jig would be my choice, and I would concentrate on the head, the run, and the tailouts. Coho and chinook also respond aggressively to a well-presented fly. 

To be effective, Chinook on the fly requires some stout, specialized rod, reel, and line combinations. But coho can easily be fished with traditional steelhead fly fishing gear with an easy-to-manage floating fly line. Remember that most regulations are now specific to many individual rivers, so always check the regulations before wetting a line.

Thousands of steelhead

The nearly historic summer steelhead run in the valley has finally slowed to a trickle. But thousands of summer steelhead remain in the Willamette River system, providing a “big-game fish” opportunity for southern Willamette Valley anglers that should last through the end of the year. The quality of the 2024 steelhead run was also timely, a consolation for the generally poor and shortened spring chinook run. 

Ironically, the Army Corps of Engineers, which had funded the production of summer steelhead under a mitigation agreement for fish habitats lost to the building of the Willamette Valley flood control dams, has announced the end of the program. 

It would be a shame to lose this big-fish opportunity that has been among our region’s most famous fall fisheries for several decades. 

Those Willamette River coho

The run size now surpasses 46,000 fish. That’s 15,000 more than returned to the Willamette River system last year. As of mid-October, the migration has slowed, but coho salmon are still passing over the Willamette Falls in Oregon City. 

At a rate of more than 300 fish per day – down significantly from the 2,500 per day earlier in October but still impressively strong – the likelihood that some of these fish have now reached the southern Willamette Valley river tributaries is pretty good. Hatchery coho was planted in the lower Willamette River near Salem in the 1990s; it was a limited, regional fishery. 

So, the explosion of naturally spawned fish, apparently the descendants of hatchery parents, has caught fisheries managers off guard. They now wonder what changes could have led to so many successfully spawning, naturalized wild coho salmon.

Historically, the Newburg pool has been the most productive Willamette River coho fishery. It is a very long and slow stretch of the river where anglers employ traditional salmon troll techniques. These techniques include trailing a variety of spinners and other lures behind rotating or dodging flashers. 

That habitat doesn’t exist in the upper Willamette River system, and there is no local pool of knowledge from which to draw. So, unfortunately, other than to direct you to gear and techniques that I have shared in this and past columns of The Chronicle gathered from my years fishing in the coastal rivers, which are characteristically much smaller waterways, 

I can’t offer you any time-tested advice on how to catch these, but I do not doubt that some innovative anglers will come along and school us all in time.

 The limit is two Willamette Basin coho per day, 10 for the season that runs to the end of the year, and you are allowed to use two rods with a two-rod endorsement. 

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