How was the opener on the American R?

[Bill Kiene semi-retired]

Jeff Ching reported that he had a 5 pounder on for a short battle but lost it on an Olive Caddis Pupa.

Anyone up near Sailor Bar yesterday?

[mogaru]

The American river is as dead and voided of fish as I've seen it. Bad to worse to terrible. The salmon run was pretty bad and the steelhead run ..................No wonder there is thread talking about bait and cocktail shrimp........sign of desperation.

[STEELIES/26c3]

I know a lot of people who have fished the AR for 20+ years and the report I got from all of them was D I S M A L.

One guide friend reported that his client hooked 1 hot, 12# steelhead and 2 smolts on a plug for his all day boat trip.

I know one gear guy who caught 1 Coleman strain steelie in the basin.

20 guys who fished between the hatchery and Sunrise hooked (0) steelhead, saw only 1 steelie landed on the opposite side of the river (I think it was Jeff C) between them all.

Lots of salmon (mostly beaters) hooked by mostly fly guys and/or flossers.

Keep in mind Bill the major failures, due to low, warm, septic... water infiltration, of the Nimbus Hatchery 2, 3 and 4 years ago. That, coupled with the drought and increased water exports to SoCal, have devastated even the hatchery's ability to sustain a healthy population of winter run fish.

This all goes to show the reality of what I have always said about the river...
It is NOT capable of sustaining numbers of natural fish and without the hatchery, we will have NO winter run steelhead.
Unfortunately, Fish and Game and Fish and Wildlife and NMFS and BOR and DWR are all under the illusion that they can add gravel to the river in a less than 12 mile stretch and that summer run fish from another hatchery (Coleman) will A) actually use it and B) use to an extent that it replaces the thousands of miles of tributaries which historically fed the 150 combined miles of (North, Middle and South Forks of the American River) ABOVE Nimbus and Folsom Dams.

I believe this is the year to go west and north for your winter steelhead fix and if mother nature continues to do what she is currently doing (raining and snowing) and if Guvna' 'MoonBeam and his cronies don't convince Trump to Mandate the twin tunnels for mass water exports south...then we may just have a decent steelhead season in 2019.

I won't count on it and hopefully I'll be in Washington state by then anyway~

oh yeah... HAPPY NEW YEAR!

[stefanoflo]

Maybe the Extra Cold frost has them still on Holiday????Hopefully, the river will warm up with fish??

[Mark Kranhold]

Don't quote me on this but I hear they're killing off all the Coleman strain at the hatchery? Has anybody heard of this?

[Terry Thomas]

I believe that is not true. I talked to an employee at the hatchery on Friday and he said that they did take some tagged Coleman fish for research, however, there is no plan to dispatch all of them. Fished a couple hours today @ Sunrise with no grabs. I did talk to one guy that said he landed two fish on the opener. I also watched him as well a few others fish the inside of the island. @ 4,000 cfs today. With the storms coming, I don't expect them to drop the flows as posted earlier and wouldn't be surprised to see them go back up.

[STEELIES/26c3]

Yes Mark they are and that was always their intention.

I started to address this topic in another forum but wanted to ask Dennis Lee a couple of things first.

The basics are:

1) The original steelhead, native to the American River (now extinct) were a summer run fish.
2) The current, predominant steelhead on the AR are Eel River winter run fish.
3) Over the years many experimental rearing and planting programs have been implemented to find a suitable replacement for the fish which the dam made extinct.
4) The only strain which REALLY took hold was the Eel R. fish
5) NMFS geneticists expressed concern that Eel R strays (from the AR...) might inter-breed and compromise the genetics of native, central valley populations of steelhead in other rivers connected to the AR via the Sacarmento/San Joaquin Delta (ie, Yuba, Mokelumne, Feather).
6) The Coleman strain was suggested as a plausible replacement because it is already native to the Sacramento River and being a summer run fish... it would better approximate the *summer-run* life history of the steelhead which inhabited the river pre-Folsom and Nimbus Dams.
7) I have friends that fished the river in the mid 1940's at what is now Rainbow Bridge in Folsom and the peak of steelhead season was June-August.
In 2015, Nimbus did not get enough returning Eel R adults to collect their quota of 450,000 eggs. They collected 150,000 and they got 160,000 additional Coleman strain eggs which were raised not only to supplement the shortfall of eggs gathered from the AR that year but also to experiment with them as a possible replacement for AR broodstock.
The problem with the Coleman fish in the AR is that they come back in the fall and are sexually immature. If the dams were not on our little river... they would continue upriver to the North, Middle and South Forks of the AR and eat stoneflies and crawdads and small fish, get fat and happy and eventually spawn in the tribs of the forks or in the forks themselves at a time (late fall to early winter) when water conditions are favorable to offspring.
9) BUT there are dams and so the Coleman fish come up in Sept-Nov, mill around, come up the ladder in December- and now... get WHACKED!
10) I believe that this is just the first phase of the study. The first order of business is simply to see how many return.
11) The CNFH all have been coded wire tagged with a blank tag.
11) I was told that Brian Poxon of CDFW is in charge of the monitoring process and has installed a V detector to count the CNFH steelies and that they are indeed being killed and returned to the river.
12) This is yet another precautionary measure to ensure that interbreeding does not occur between Coleman fish and Eel R fish or other naturally-spawning stocks in the river.
13) I am NOT an expert in fisheries biology or genetics but I have a pretty decent grasp on the biology and ecology of our river and I believe that this and most of the studies implemented on the AR are just a song and dance and an incredible waste of time and money.
14) Without flows of 2000-2500 CFS for most of if not all year AND sustained inundated floodplains as nurseries, there will NEVER be a naturally occurring strain of steelhead in the AR... so I am not sure what is really being 'protected' by killing off the Coleman fish once they enter the Nimbus Fish Ladder.
15) I say put them back in the river as a put and take fishery and continue to spawn Eel River steelies in the winter as they have done for 50 years.
16) Spend the money on nursery habitat restoration on the AR or better yet on other watersheds with viable native fish populations like the Smith, Eel, SFE, Navarro, Gualala, etc...

[koffler]

I was out for about 3 hrs. Felt like a smaller fish but was indicating double egg. Lost him/her in higher current middle of river. Saw one bait guy catch a nice 7 lb or so hatchery fish.

Editing this post, my bad, wasnt bait, he had some sort of lure (i helped him lqnd the fish)

[STEELIES/26c3]

CDFW will never be able to dispatch all of the Coleman fish anyway because I'm sure only a percentage will go up the ladder.

[Bill Kiene semi-retired]

Before all the dams I think many longer rivers had summer run Steelhead way up stream living all summer in those deep trout holes.