Coho turn the corner.

Byline: MIKE STAHLBERG The Register-Guard

THEY'RE B-A-A-C-K!

Like Jack Nicholson's character in the movie "The Shining," native coho salmon have escaped from the brink of elimination.

In fact, they're practically beating down the doors to Oregon waterways, with more coho returning to spawn this winter than at any other time since the 1960s.

"The counts are the highest I've ever seen," said Steve Jacobs, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) research biologist who's been involved in spawning ground surveys on the Oregon Coast since 1985.

Jacobs heads up the Oregon Coastal Salmonid Monitoring Project. The program employs about 50 stream surveyors, who repeatedly wade more than 700 stretches of rivers and streams each winter, counting salmon and steelhead that have returned to spawn.

The results of those sample surveys are plugged into formulas used to project the overall spawning "escapement" coastwide.

Data on the 2002-03 salmon spawning season is still coming in, but Jacobs says he's "pretty confident" that at least 200,000 coho salmon returned to the spawning grounds during the winter of 2001-02. It could go as high as 300,000, he said.

It was the second banner spawning season in a row for coho, and set the stage for increasing ocean salmon fishing opportunities this summer.

It was only a year ago that biologists were celebrating a coho spawning escapement of 149,058.

"That was the highest number in over 30 years," said Steve King, the ODFW's salmon program leader.

The estimate of a 200,000- to 300,000-coho-spawning escapement this winter "is excellent news," King said. "These were a stock of fish that were listed as `threatened' ' under the federal Endangered Species Act.

That listing came in the early 1990s, when spawning ground counts once dropped below 15,000 fish and two other times below 20,000. "Most other years, they were in the 40- to 70-thousands," King said.

Meanwhile, this winter's return of hatchery-reared coho salmon to the Columbia River was also much better than expected.

"We forecast a run back to the Columbia of about 200,000 coho and the actual run was 450,000," King said. Among those were 47,000 jack coho salmon, up from 24,000 the previous year.

Jack salmon - immature males that return a year earlier than most of their brothers and sisters - are the most reliable indicator of the size of the following year's adult run.

The numbers mean "the hatchery run in '03 is going to be up over '02," King said.

All this is good news for Oregon sport anglers because it means regulatory agencies will be able to allow a longer ocean season this summer.

The team of scientists that makes the formal predictions of salmon abundance used by state and federal regulators in setting the harvest quota will meet the first week of February.

King, who is a member of that team, says he expects the allowable harvest of fin-clipped hatchery coho to take a big jump in 2003.

Last summer, anglers were allowed to harvest 22,500 coho salmon in the management zone that stretches from Cape Falcon, just north of Tillamook, to Humbug Mountain, near Port Orford. Fishing was halted Aug. 1 because the quota had been filled.

"I would hope we could double that this year," King said. That would put the 2003 quota at 45,000 coho.

The driving factor in the quota is the number of "Oregon natural coho" returning to coastal rivers and streams. That return is measured by the ODFW's Coastal Salmonid Inventory Project. Workers for the project wade randomly selected sections of coastal streams several times during the fall and winter months, counting live salmon, spawned-out carcasses and "redds," or gravel nests made by spawners.

The surveyors found some dramatic increases this winter.

The Siuslaw River basin, for example, "was incredible this year," Jacobs said. "We had an average peak count of 53 fish per mile - last year was only eight fish per mile."

Big jumps in the average peak count were also posted in the Wilson River basin (43 this year vs. six last year); the Tahkenitch Creek basin (380 vs. 81); the Yaquina River (53 vs. 13) and the Siletz River (18 vs. 6).

"Coho are recovering faster, probably, than everybody thought they would," King said.

In fact, he said, "they're recovering faster than the paperwork can be done" to establish the "recovery goals" that coho must meet before they can be removed from protective status.

The high spawning ground numbers, King said, coupled with the fact that "the parents of next summer's run were strong and ocean conditions were ideal" means regulators can be less protective of the 2003 wild run.

Under the approved management plan, he said, "our impact on wild coho can rise to 15 percent. We were managing for about 11 percent last year and 8 the year before."

No harvest of unmarked "wild" coho is allowed. The "impact" King referred to is due to mortality among fish that are "hooked and released" by anglers targeting hatchery-marked coho or chinook salmon.

King is looking for another strong year for chinook, coming on the heels of "one of the strongest landings ever" for ocean chinook.

"The (commercial) trollers landed about 330,000 chinook in 2002' in the Cape Falcon-Humbug Mountain zone, King said, while the sport anglers added 34,300 to the chinook harvest.

"It was really a strong year for chinook," King said. "When the coho season closed last year, a lot of people just kept on fishing for chinook."

Spawning ground counts for fall chinook were also exceptional this year.

"When you add all the chinook index counts for the entire coast, it's a record high for fall spawners - and our database goes back over 50 years," King said.

King said he sees "nothing to suggest that we can't repeat the sport fishing for chinook that we had last year."

The combined coho and chinook spawning returns may have been best summed up by Bob Buckman, Newport fish biologist whose district ranges from the Siletz River Basin to the Siuslaw.

"It looks as good as we ever could have imagined," Buckman said.

CAPTION(S):

The cutline goes in this very spot. MIKE STAHLBERG / The Register-Guard OREGON DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND WILDLIFE An ODFW stream surveyor wades a tributary in the Siuslaw River Basin checking for spawning salmon. MIKE STAHLBERG / The Register-Guard Researchers are predicting the largest coho salmon return since the 1960s as fish like this spawned-out salmon return from the ocean. OREGON DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND WILDLIFE Researchers are predicting the level of coho salmon escapement this winter could reach 300,000.