We had a great day yesterday working with the WA Fish & Wildlife to put 10,000 Chum Fry into holding raceways over at Dave Brown’s Wild Fish Rescue operation just off the East Fork Lewis River. They will stay there for about two weeks and then be released into the East Fork. Chum are the fish food for all the other salmon, they are “Threatened & Endangered” federally listed but the population in the East Fork which used to be 10’s of thousand is down to 5 or 6 fish.
This is a major effort sponsored by Bonneville Power Agency and the WA Fish & Wildlife to bring chum back to the East Fork as well as the whole lower Columbia River Basin.
We still have another 100,000 chum fry that we will be getting in about 2 weeks and these will go into the Dean Swanson-Fish First new chum channel that together we upgraded last fall. We will keep you posted as to when and what time this will occur, with the invitation you come down and see the event. Many of you worked very hard with us in the upgrading and rebuilding of the old chum channel at Swanson’s.
This is a very important new program with the Swanson Family, BPA, WA F&W, Fish First, Friends of the East Fork, and many volunteers all working together to make it happen. The program is set up to operate for 12 years with reviews every year to make adjustments to improve the success of meeting the objective of rebuilding the critical chum populations.
We also have the plans done for Phase-1 (2 side channels to protect fry and juveniles from high summer river temperatures and winter flood flows) just below Daybreak Bridge and are submitting the permit papers now, with the goal of building this phase of the project this summer.
More extensive detailed news articles to come.
Dick Dyrland
Board of Directors
Fish First & Friends of the East Fork Lewis River