The Big One

Everyone probably has heard that the DFG has closed our section of the Sacramento River to Salmon fishing this year.  So with that said, check out this story that ran in the Red Bluff Daily News today:

Big one didn t get away

By JULIE ZEEB -DN Staff Writer

Article Last Updated: 11/06/2008 07:20:29 AM PST

BATTLE CREEK Last Thursday was anything but a normal work day for Doug Killam, an associate fisheries biologist for the Department of Fish and Games Red Bluff office.

I was doing a walking survey in Battle Creek to estimate the fall run, Killam said.

What Killam and the rest of his crew didn’t know was that an extremely large and very dead fish awaited them in the creek, located along the border of Shasta and Tehama counties leading to Coleman National Fish Hatchery.

This one was just big, Killam said. It caught everyone s attention.

Largest Chinook I’ve seen.

Killam and his crew used the length and girth of the fish, about 51 inches or a little more than 4 feet long, to estimate the size at 85 pounds, he said.

It s a shame we didn’t see it while it was alive, Killam said.

If it was caught in the ocean, it would have been a state record, maybe even a world record.

The state record was set by O.H. Lindberg on Nov. 21, 1979, when he landed an 88-pound Chinook in the Shasta area, according to the California Department of Fish and Game.

The world record 97 pounds, but Killam isn’t certain about the exact size of the fish prior to its death.

When we find them as carcasses, typically, they’ve stopped eating months ago, Killam said.

Killam estimated the fish had stopped eating about June or July, made the trip from the ocean to the creek, spawned sometime in October and died about a week before it was found, he said.

The fish was not put on a scale due to its size and the formula for measuring by girth and length is not exact because sometimes those formulas aren’t designed for extreme fish like this one, Killam said.

The average Chinook salmon returning to spawn is about 25 pounds, said Scott Hamelberg, project leader for Coleman National Fish Hatchery.

It was a big fish, Hamelberg said. I’ve never seen an 80-pound Chinook come through Coleman Fish Hatchery in my years here, but we get the whole range.

The biggest to swim through Coleman this year at fall run was a 53- pounder, he said.

There s any variety of size, Hamelberg said.

It s largely due to the genetics of the fish. It s just like any other animal, part driven by genetics, part driven by age and part driven by ability to find food to eat.

Fall run has been exceptionally low this year, Hamelberg said.

The bottom line is the ocean sport and fisheries all were closed this year because numbers were expected to decline, he said.

This year s fall run was expected to be around 60,000 salmon, about a third lower than 2007 s 90,000 salmon, he said.

Coleman had 22,000 salmon in Battle Creek in 2007 and was expected to have between 14,000- 15,000 this year, he said.

To date, they’ve had more than 13,000 return.