Thank you Dan Balch and your team of more than 30 volunteers that have helped raise and release 150,000 salmon smolts in the Woodland net pens this year. Saturday, March 27 marked the last release for 2004, of 75,000 Spring Chinook smolts.

New members, Ken Gallagher and Dick Maug assisted Balch and other volunteers with release of the fish and washing and storing the nets.

This is the second year that no steelhead will be put into our net pens. The steelhead have gotten a disease at the Skamania Hatchery and the smolts will be out-planted from their location.

We have 40,000 Kokonee and 60,000 steelhead in pens at Spealyi Bay.

In the early years game fish were regulated by Department of Wildlife who oversaw sport-fishing. Commercial harvest of salmon was regulated by Department of Fisheries.

In 1995 the two merged to form Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife (WDFW). The hatcheries perform a balancing act, meeting the needs of commercial, sport and tribal fishing. Fish First helped implement changes at the local hatchery. By putting net pens in the lower river, we took the pressure off the hatchery at a critical time. Overcrowding occurs in the hatchery ponds as the fry grow. Putting fish into the Fish First net pens takes the pressure off the hatchery ponds and produces a better smolt. Although we feed a balanced diet to the net pen fish, we feed less and the additional food they receive comes to them through the river. The net pen fish seem healthier for taking nutrients from both sources. They imprint with the area and are released as smolts. This stretches out fishing pressure over a greater distance of the river, rather than fishing only near the hatchery.

Culverts were a necessity having little regard for fish passage when they were constructed. Managing a stream so a vehicle could cross it, was foremost in the minds of the construction crews. A lot of the streams in Clark County have been blocked by culverts for the past 50 years. In the 1980’s, 86% of the upstream spawning areas were blocked by culverts. This is changing.

If 95% of spawning for Coho, steelhead and cutthroat is in tributaries, and we have lost 80% or more of those upstream tribs., then this is devastating to spawning adults. As we repair the culverts, we kick start the streams by installing egg boxes (fish egg incubators) as high up on the creeks as possible.

A Remote Site Incubator (RSI or egg box) is placed in the upper reaches of a stream. Members under the direction of Mike Moss, closely monitor the incubating eggs for water flow and silt. The young fish leave the egg box after the egg sack has absorbed and spend approximately 14 months, sometimes longer, imprinting with the stream, before traveling to the ocean as smolt. Fish First raised fish in the egg boxes five years and found that we were only getting 7-15 adult fish back per RSI. 10,000 eggs in a small egg box took about 3.5 females and 3.5 males to produce and we got back 7 to 15 adults. We had to improve those results.

We found out that nutrient levels in our creeks was low and it’s important for the juveniles to be able to feed on the rotting carcasses of the spawned adults. A study, done in Alaska, confirmed that 87% of the body mass of the juvenile fish was from the salmon carcasses that had produced the juveniles. With today's low fish returns, there are not enough nutrients in our river to support the native fish.

Past hatchery practices dumped fry into the river. They overloaded the stream and sometimes even starved the native fish. That practice has been changed.

We decided we needed to increase the nutrient load in the streams that supported our egg boxes and our Nutrient Enhancement division was born. Fish First negotiated with the hatcheries to give us a few hundred dead silver salmon to use as nutrients to put in upstream of the RSI’s on the North Fork Lewis River tributaries.

We found the returns to be between 250 and 450 adult salmon spawning in the creeks that had the egg boxes. The nutrients do make a difference!

Now we release anywhere from 5,000 to 11,000 carcasses in the North and East Fork Lewis River tributaries each year.

"We used to spawn the biggest males with the biggest females. Today, we don’t select mate, but random spawn fish pairs one to one." said Phillips in a recent phone interview.

"The hatchery practice of transferring fish stocks from one stream to another has ceased. We have a hundred years under our belts of spreading the genetics from one stream to another." said Gary Loomis, FF President. This is the first year we were able to take our returning summer run steelhead eggs from North Fork fish, instead of from the Washougal salmon, to release as smolts in the North Fork Lewis."

"Every year since 1996 we’ve

had eight egg boxes on five creeks. We’ve hatched 80,000 fish each year (1996-2002). In 2003 and 2004 WDFW gave us 280,000 eyed silver eggs and last year we received 860,000 silvers.

With the increase of nutrients, miles of in-stream restoration, holding ponds for smolt and egg boxes in the Cedar Crk. drainage, we have gone from approx. 35 returning silvers in 1992 to 34,500 in 2003. This success is very exciting!"

"Fish First’s net pens has decreased our density at the hatchery, to allow us to raise more and better quality fish." said Phillips.

In past years WDFW has provided 200 live pair, adult wild silver salmon in Cedar Crk. 320 pair of wild silvers were placed in tribs. of the North Fork using Fish Firsts’ two pick-up trucks adapted with aerated tanks that keep the fish alive in transport.

The Circle of Death was developed in 1995 to give our new organization somewhere to go. We saw predators, habitat, permits, development, hatcheries, over-harvest, fish passage and logging as things that contributed to salmon decline. In the next few paragraphs I will attempt to review each topic.

We were having trouble getting permits in 1995. Today we have a 10A1A permit from NOAA Fisheries that allows us 20 projects without reinventing the wheel and duplicating paperwork for each. It took volunteers hundreds of hours to be able to get this permit. It was first used on the Doty project last summer.

The City of Battle Ground is trying to expand towards the banks of the East Fork Lewis River. Industry in that area would further jeopardize listed species. Our informed members have been instrumental in delaying and asking politicians to re-think that expansion.

USFW and NOAA Fisheries are considering giving the first ever HCP (Habitat Conservation Plan) to a gravel mine operator to continue mining near the banks of the East Fork. The impacts to the fish and the health of the lower river can

not be mitigated.

The over-harvest of hatchery fish and the bi-catch of wild and native fish is still a problem. We have to find a better way to harvest these fish without wrapping a net around their gills. In 2002-2003 when 2% of commercial fishermen tried the tangle nets, they harvested 22,076 steelhead that weren’t supposed to be netted or handled. This year the hatcheries are reporting that all returning late winter and spring fish have net marks on them, including the steelhead. Early netting this year saw twice as many steelhead caught as spring Chinook. Ten days later WDFW opened the netting season, and the captains of the commercial boats in some cases, didn’t let the observers on the boats. We have a long ways to go in managing and enforcing harvest issues.

The wild and native fish must be allowed to pass by the grasp of commercial harvesters, so they can spawn and increase in number.

Replacing culverts to allow fish passage is on-going. Fish First replaced a culvert under a railroad track near Yacolt a few years back. An 11’ culvert was replaced with 25’ wide cement footings to support a dome culvert and the stream that flows through it emulates the river bed. We now have 100% migration of both adults and fry accessing the upper watershed on this stream, and they don’t realize they are passing thru a culvert.

We have worked very diligently with small private timber growers, who have allowed us onto their land to place egg boxes, improve spawning and rearing, and helped us with over three miles of in-stream restoration on Cedar Crk. We have built miles of fencing, cleaned up two dairies and placed thousands of riparian plants.

"Predators. We seem to have a few more fish to go around. Predator numbers have increased. Some are protected. Over 3000 seals seasonally reside off the Columbia River. The cormorant (a protected fish-eating bird), not indigenous to this area, feasts on smolts that transition where fresh and salt water meet on the lower Columbia. They are on the increase. Big aggressive sea lions can weigh over 1000 pounds. They follow the fishing boats tearing the nets, eating the fish. We need to figure out how to keep the sea lions away. These are all Federally protected things affecting salmon, that seem not to have any ears to common sense."

The Circle of Death, although written nine years ago, is still a viable document that accurately shows things that should be addressed to improve conditions for native fish. The Circle of Life is our goals to get these changes made.

Both are included in this newsletter.

"The 4 – H’s. In 1996 we went to a meeting in Redmond, WA. to talk to Slade Gorton about the 4-H’s: hydro, hatchery, habitat and harvest. After his 20 minutes speech, just before opening the floor for questions, he said we will talk about the four H’s today, but we won’t talk about harvest. I guess we know where his money for reelection was coming from. Still today, nothing has been done to improve harvest practices so it doesn’t impact the wild and native fish. We need to put our heads together to find a better way to harvest. Tangle nets don’t seem to be reducing the bi-catch. Canada tried them for seven years and decided they were not a way to commercially harvest fish."

"Hydro has probably seen more changes than any of the others. Looking at the last three years of returns of spring Chinook over the Bonneville Dam and Snake River Dams, managers now have exceeded over 1 billion dollars in barging smolts, down and past the Snake and Bonneville Dams. What is exciting is the changes in the dams themselves. The turbine blades have been reconfigured to do less damage to fish. The blades now kill less than 5% of the fish that go thru the turbines. They also have huge collection boxes, where fish congregate and are released thru a low velocity spill." " I was at the President Bush’s speech at Ice Harbor Dam in Pasco last summer. After the speech, a writer from Seattle came up to me and said, " Mr. Loomis, how were you able to meet the President and get to this facility to be greeted by him? And then he asked, What do you think about Pres. Bush taking credit for the last two years of great fish runs over the dams, when we know that it was only ocean conditions that did this." I replied, " I don’t remember the President taking credit for it. I remember him stating that for the last two years we have had great fish runs. My question to you is, All of these fish that came back had to go down thru all of the dams to get to the great ocean conditions, and the survival was excellent. They then had to make it back up thru the dams to the upper watersheds. How is it that there are rivers with no dams on them today, that have a worse return than the Snake River, with its’ six dams that fish have to go thru?" He had no answer for me. Hydro-electric doesn’t help the salmon. It would be better for the salmon if it wasn’t there. But for all the benefits of hydroelectric power for our society, I think that managers have proven that they can co-exist with fish. I would like to see them continue to improve the living conditions for the salmon. The Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board (LCFRB) studied rivers below Bonneville Dam, trying to access which one had the most potential to recover salmon. The river they named is the East Fork Lewis, which has no dams on it. We will talk more about this issue in the May newsletter."

Hatcheries were discussed earlier in this column. We continue to work with WDFW and the local hatcheries and have a good repore with their employees.

Habitat – "Fish First is trying to ‘set the bar’ on habitat. In-stream habitat and all the other things we do as an organization, is increasing fish populations in our drainage. In our first five years, we did three to five in-stream projects per year. These included replacing and/or removing culverts, fencing cattle out of the stream, stream-bank repair and vegetative plantings, placing carcasses in the stream, reconnecting old channels and developing off-channel rearing habitat. I hope more in-stream habitat projects are being done throughout the Pacific Northwest to benefit salmon in other watersheds. The EDT model that WDFW Region 5 came up with, really proves that restoring habitat increases the number of outgoing smolts and brings back larger returns."

Harvest - We can put lots of wild smolts into the ocean, but if they use the same non-selective incidental harvest methods that commercial fishermen have used for the last 150 years, the restored habitat won’t be used adequately. Returning numbers of adults will continue to be low. Harvest managers need to reassess non-selective harvest methods and allowable escapement of wild and native fish. We must let all the wild fish go up the rivers to spawn. If all of the wild and native fish were given that privilege for a ten year period of time, we would see a noticeable increase of salmon and spawning in our rivers.

April 29, 2004 at 7 p.m. the Hearings Examiner will meet with citizens to hear testimony for and against the proposed JL Storedahl gravel mine expansion on the East Fork Lewis River. This meeting will be open to the public and held at the Public Service Center, 1300 Franklin St., Vancouver.

The controversial Daybreak Gravel Mine expansion on the East Fork Lewis River in Clark County, has drawn a lot of media attention.

Note: Investigative reporter for the Columbian Newspaper, Kathy Durbin’s latest article March 29, 2004 titled ‘Storedahl Dissent Silenced?’

Read the article at

The JL Storedahl Gravel Mine Expansion proposed Habitat Conservation Plan is not mitigable. It greatly impacts endangered species that include Chum salmon, Coho salmon, summer and winter run steelhead and Bull trout, not to mention benthic macro-invertebrates, and other ‘water bugs’ that salmon feed on. It impacts our drinking water quality and quantity and it has great impacts on downstream residences.

JLS recently received a mine expansion at the Tebo Pit about two miles away from the controversial pit, on a high bluff out of the flood plain.

The Daybreak Mine site has been closed to mining for several years now, and JL Storedahl wants to expand mining to include 161 additional acres of the 291 acre site on the banks of the East Fork Lewis River.