Trinity Info From DFG

[Bruce Berman]

I received a nice letter from a gal at dfg today. She was answering a note I sent with some tags taken from Trinity River steelhead. I'd commented that this year sure wasn't like 2007.

She wrote that this year, dfg tagged only 20% of the steelies they tagged in '07 at the Willow Creek Weir.

The good news is that they saw twice as many chinooks and four times as many coho as they did last year.

At least SOMETHING to do with anadromous fish is going the right way!

[jhaquett]

How is the wild run doing comparatively this year? I have only fished it twice this year but both times I have either heard of or have seen people hooking/landing nothing but 30" wilds.

It seems like last year there was an outrageous number of hatchery fish, which IMO, doesn't make it a necessarily healthy run.

[Bruce Berman]

I saw a weir count from early November. There were almost as many wild fish as hatchery. People who are into the health of the fishery are both surprised and happy with that info. I think I heard that the wild fish had been in decline the past few years.

Also, this year the fish were supposedly larger. I heard this from fisherman, but I've seen no data to back this up.

[flyfshrmn]

Got four days in on the river over the holiday, about 2-3 hours per day. Weather was cool and cloudy until midday or later, then it would clear briefly in the late afternoon and evenings. Five hookups, 3 fish landed, all on swung wet flies. Attached are a couple of pix.

[lynnwhite44]

Nice lookin fish. What were ya swingin?

[flyfshrmn]

I was using a couple of different wet flies in size 10 and 12, a brown hackle peacock, a variation of that fly that I tie with both brown and gray hackle, and a couple of general wet flies with brown and gray bodies. I don't think it's the fly so much, although size is a factor, but the presentation. Standard size twelve wet fly hooks are not strong enough for these fish. The fish in the pic by the boat straightened out a standard tiemco size 12. You need to go to heavy wire hooks. I'm also using fairly heavy leader, 2x or 3x, at least 8.5 lb. test.

[Terry Thomas]

Although the counts for the Willow Creek Weir on salmon are up this year, they are still tragically low. As of 11/25/08 the Chinook count was 2143 compared to 1056 last year. The Coho count was 448 compared to 111 last year. The biggest shock was in the steelhead count, 919 this year compared to 5189 last year. A biologist for the tribe in Hoopa was in the shop two weeks ago was upbeat on the half pounder run on the Trinity in the Hoopa area. According to him, @90% of the wild adults come from the half pounders that we have seen in the system this year. Perhaps better things to come in the next year or two?