Most anadromous smolts outmigrate in the spring.  While a few stragglers may still move through the system over the remainder of the year, at this point we have a pretty complete count of this year’s totals for fish moving from the Crooked, Metolius, and upper Deschutes rivers to the Selective Water Withdrawal tower in Lake Billy Chinook where they are captured and then released into the lower Deschutes.

	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018
CHS	21,261	19,071	15,418	16,997	29,785	19,965
STS	2,733	2,127	3,702	4,024	10,708	8,881
SOC	25,265	155,031	38,702	49,497	439,458	47,392

CHS are chinook, STS are steelhead, and SOC are sockeye.  There’s some good news and some bad news in these figures.

2017 was a big water year with high flows which helped smolts find their way to the SWW.  Otherwise, 2018 was reasonably good compared to other years, especially for steelhead.  The belief is that this is largely due to nighttime water releases from the SWW, the time when smolts prefer to move downstream.  This is the second year for nighttime flows during peak outmigration periods.  It’s only fair to note that this is not a time when PGE/CTWS makes money from power generation.

Hopefully we will see some improved adult returns from these juvenile fish in the future.

The bad news is that these numbers remain disappointingly small when compared to the hundreds of thousands of chinook and steelhead that were planted to produce them (sockeye are wild).  As I have discussed in past posts, there seems to be a variety of causes for the low rate of success but it appears that the primary reason is the poor quality of the hatchery fish that are used for stocking.  Many of the biologists I have talked to believe that there will be little improvement until this root issue is addressed .