As we enter peak season for chinook on the lower river, so we enter the sea lion circus. Most of the breeding population remains off the California coast, but young bull California sea lions are taking advantage of the ample food sources on the lower Columbia, much to the frustration of sport anglers. It’s hard […]
August 1st marked the opener of the Buoy 10 season; it’s the time of year that all Pacific Northwest anglers wait for. The fishery likely offers the best chance at a freshwater caught chinook or coho salmon in the entire region, and with about 1.7 million of them coming back, you can understand why the […]
People who attempt to push controversial measures through Congress aren’t fans of straight talk. They rarely set out their goals in plain black-and-white language, preferring words likely to appeal to the public while cloaking their true intent. And then they garnish those words with assurances that their efforts are “reasonable” and merely “common sense.” Recent […]
Of all the fish in the Gulf of Mexico, red snapper aren’t the biggest; or the fastest; they’re not quite the brightest (color, not smarts); and not the strongest. But they’re surely the most political. From the perspective of the commercial fishing industry, red snapper management in the Gulf of Mexico is both a great […]
Fish populations have limits that cannot be exceeded without causing harm at the ecosystem level. This is especially true for the forage species — including but not limited to the herrings, anchovies, menhaden, mackerel and sardine — that serve the critical role of providing food and energy for all of life above them on the […]
I’ve been raving about the fluke (summer flounder) fishing for several years now. Because it’s been pretty darn good! I mean, it’s basically been a completely different fishery than it was 10 years ago. Simply put, there have been dramatically more and larger fish around, up until fairly recently anyway. It certainly wasn’t always this […]
June was a bad month for fishery-dependent, coastal communities. On the back of the passage of H.R. 1335—a bill that puts short-term economic gains ahead of sustainable fisheries—the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (Council) failed to impose significant bycatch cuts to the Bering Sea/Aleutian Island trawl fleet. As was noted a few weeks ago, Pacific […]
Wait on ‘em Stevie, wait………..hold on……….hold on………. Okay, get him! It can often take a great deal of patience to catch a sturgeon. They’re not aggressive biters but fishing in the lower Columbia River estuary, where there are thousands and thousands of the beasts, is very exciting! This fishery is world-class, but you wouldn’t know […]
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