Washington will reopen spring chinook fishing on the Snake River near Little Goose and Ice Harbor dams this week.
The Little Goose area is open Tuesdays and Fridays and the Ice Harbor area is open Wednesdays and Thursdays. Anglers can catch as many as four hatchery spring chinook but only one of them can be an adult fish.
The two fishing seasons were closed earlier this month after the spring chinook run failed to materialize. But the fish made a late surge in the past two weeks.
Washington and Oregon also reopened spring chinook fishing on the parts of the lower and middle sections of the Columbia River in a six-day season that started Friday.
Even with the late push, the run is expected to be significantly smaller than the preseason forecast of nearly 200,000 fish bound for tributaries of the Columbia River upstream of Bonneville Dam. On Monday last week, state, tribal and federal fisheries managers downgraded that forecast to 139,000.
On Thursday last week, Idaho reduced the bag limit on the lower Salmon and Little Salmon rivers to one adult hatchery fish per day because of lower than expected returns to the Rapid River hatchery.
