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National Geographic : 1974 Dec
Contents
first counting-period, she never took her eyes off the fish. During her break, Opal added a fifth of her 50-minute total to round out the hour's count. She still watched the water. "What a pity. All those beautiful fish, and I'm not allowed to count them." Salmon Swim a Comeback Trail Today salmon return to streams where, until recent years, none had ever run. A fish way around a 60-foot cascade, for instance, has made it possible to establish a new sal mon population on the Wind River, a Colum bia tributary in Washington State. At the federal fish hatchery 20 miles up stream, I found assistant manager Don Zir jacks stripping eggs and milt from spring salmon. The fish had spent the summer in the hatchery's holding pens, eating nothing and ripening for spawning. "We got our first brood stock in 1955 from the fishways at Bonneville Dam," Don said. "Now we have about 5,000 fish making their way here up the Wind River every spring. We take their eggs in September, and release about 2,000,000 five-inch fingerlings in April." Most of the Columbia salmon catch is taken offshore in the Pacific, though tens of thousands of sportsmen fish the river and its tributaries when the salmon are running. Commercial gill-netters are allowed on the lower river during the peak periods. On a sandbar near Astoria, I came upon 58 members of a fishing family (page 836). They were broiling ears of corn and toasting hot dogs around a huge driftwood fire. Oscar Haglund and his wife, Lisett, raised 12 children on a houseboat, and all nine sons became gill-netters. "We started fishing with Dad when we were about 6," Marvin Haglund told me. "Dad let Oscar Junior and me go by ourselves when hewas10andIwas9.Thetwoofus used to catch as much as a ton on a big night. "When the dams came, the catch got smaller. Things have improved since then, Tossed by a bucking torrent, two adven turers challenge the Deschutes, a north ward-flowing tributary in Oregon. After decades of gentling, the Columbia itself no longer runs wild and free, but efforts to halt pollution and retain the remaining beauty of its course foretell a better future for this giant among western rivers. but there are still fewer salmon in the river than before. "Individual fish are bigger, though. Arti ficial spawning and selection of the fittest spawners produces better fish." The proof of that might be in the catching and the tasting. At five o'clock on a misty morning I went out through the mouth of the Columbia on a salmon charter boat. Before noon, nearly 3,000 boats were churning the estuary like a convention of ducks on a pond. All twelve of us aboard caught a limit, three salmon, cohos and chinooks. "On an average weekend charter trip," skipper Larry Heasley observed, "your catch will cost you about three or four dollars a pound, figuring the boat and tackle, food, lodging, and transportation." I looked with renewed astonishment at the wall-to-wall boats around us. "This Labor Day crowd is probably putting a million bucks into catching salmon today. And as you see, we do catch them." Hatcheries, fishways, research, regulation. Money, work, concern. Add them up and you 846
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