A2
THE ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2019
IN BRIEF
Halibut fi shing closes on North Coast
The Pacifi c halibut all-depth sport fi shery on the North
Coast closed a day early after fi shermen hit their quota.
The fi shery in the Columbia River subarea, which
was supposed to remain open through Thursday, is now
closed for the rest of the year. Fishery managers say both
effort and catch during the fi rst two sets of open days this
month were high.
Rep. Mitchell to hold town hall
State Rep. Tiffi ny Mitchell, D-Astoria, will hold
a town hall at 10 a.m. Sunday in the Warrenton High
School gymnasium at 1700 S. Main Ave.
— The Astorian
DEATH
May 25, 2019
MOORE, Colin Eugene, 64, of Astoria, died in
Astoria. Ocean View Funeral & Cremation Service of
Astoria is in charge of the arrangements.
Luke Whittaker/Chinook Observer
MEMORIAL
Saturday, June 1
WILLIAMS, Daniel Brian — Memorial at 2 p.m.,
Camp Rilea Log Conference Center, 33168 Patriot
Way in Warrenton.
false information and reck-
less driving. Vazquez was
stopped for going 100 mph
in a 55-mph zone. Vazquez
denied having ID, provided
a false name and refused a
breath test. Police later iden-
tifi ed Vazquez and took him
to the Clatsop County Jail,
where he recorded a blood
alcohol content of 0.03%
and agreed to provide a urine
sample and meet with a drug
recognition expert.
• State police arrested
James Willott, 33, of Van-
couver, Washington, on Sat-
urday for DUII , reckless
driving, attempting to elude,
offensive littering and fail-
ure to present an opera-
tor’s license. According to
police, Willott was observed
by other drivers, and later an
offi cer, eastbound on U.S.
Highway 26 speeding and
making dangerous passes.
He allegedly fl ed from police
after being pulled over. He
pulled off on a logging road
and approached someone’s
house asking for gas. State
troopers and members of the
Washington County Sher-
iff’s Offi ce arrived and found
Willott in a garage. They
arrested him after a short
pursuit on foot.
• State police arrested
Danny Parker III, 36, of
Portland, on Saturday for
two counts of second-de-
gree assault, attempting to
elude police, DUII , hit-and-
run and two counts of reck-
less endangerment. Police
responded to a two-vehicle
crash on the Washington end
of the Astoria Bridge. Park-
er’s vehicle left the scene of
the crash and traveled south-
bound. After briefl y fail-
ing to yield, Parker surren-
dered to police and recorded
a blood alcohol content of
0.20%
• The Clatsop County
Sheriff’s Offi ce arrested
Thomas Moor, 51, of Asto-
ria, around 2 p.m. Saturday
near the Buoy 9 Restaurant
in Hammond for DUII .
PUBLIC MEETINGS
THURSDAY
Clatsop County Recreational Lands Planning and Advi-
sory Committee, 1 to 3 p.m., fourth fl oor, 800 Exchange St.
Youngs River Lewis & Clark Water District, 3 p.m., 34583
U.S. Highway 101 Business.
Warrenton Planning Commission, 5 p.m., City Hall, 225 S.
Main Ave.
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DailyAstorian.com
Sturgeon start biting as season’s end nears
By LUKE WHITTAKER
Chinook Observer
ON THE RECORD
Assault
•
Warrenton
police
arrested Kenneth Stan-
dring, 22, of Warrenton,
on Saturday for two counts
of fourth-degree assault,
third-degree criminal mis-
chief, harassment and stran-
gulation. According to
police, Standring assaulted
his sister, grabbing her by the
neck and throwing her to the
ground.
•
Warrenton
police
arrested
Cody
Atkins,
24, of Astoria, on Friday
for fourth-degree assault,
fi rst-degree burglary, sec-
ond-degree criminal mis-
chief and fi rst-degree crim-
inal trespassing. According
to police, Atkins broke into
a camper trailer parked on
Birch Court and attacked the
owner.
DUII
• Astoria police arrested
Joshua Ryan Hudak, 21, of
Astoria, on Tuesday for driv-
ing under the infl uence of
intoxicants. Hudak, carrying
two passengers, drove his
vehicle down an embank-
ment, missing multiple trees
and vehicles, according to
police. He and the passen-
gers, all with facial and head
injuries, initially fl ed the
scene after the car came to a
stop but were later contacted,
after which police arrested
Hudak .
• Warrenton
police
arrested Shawn Driggers, 30,
of Grand Rapids, Michigan,
on Sunday for DUII and reck-
less endangerment. Accord-
ing to police, Driggers, who
had three passengers in his
vehicle, was observed by an
offi cer speeding southbound
on U.S. Highway 101 and
unable to maintain lanes. He
was pulled over on the Fort
Stevens Highway Spur and
recorded a blood alcohol
content of 0.10%
• State police arrested
Eduardo
Vazquez,
21,
of Beaverton, on Sun-
day for DUII , failure to
carry a license, providing
Deckhand Steven Perkins pulled a keeper sturgeon from the ice box as fellow deckhand Ryan Hung carried another sturgeon
down the dock for a customer after a successful trip for the Sea Breeze Charter fl eet.
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ILWACO — Eli Jamie-
son couldn’t help but smile
as a small crowd gathered to
admire his catch.
It was the fi rst keeper
sturgeon the Tygh Valley,
Oregon, resident had caught
in nearly a decade and at
49 inches and 43 pounds
among the biggest brought
to the Ilwaco dock this
season.
“It’s the fi rst keeper I’ve
had in eight years,” Jamie-
son said. “This baby was
just shy of 50 inches.”
The fi sh was soon
whisked away by Sea
Breeze Charter deckhand
Ryan Hung and delivered
to Sportsmen’s Cannery,
where Kevin Ward began a
familiar routine of removing
the fi ns and delicately cut-
ting away thick fi llets.
After a relatively slow
start to the season, stur-
geon fi shing has heated up
in recent weeks with more
keepers being caught.
The fi shery has been
open Monday, Wednesday
and Saturday since May 13
and will continue through
Wednesday, from the Wauna
power lines downriver to
Buoy 10 and adjacent Wash-
ington tributaries.
The fi shery closes at
2 p.m. each of those days.
Only white sturgeon mea-
suring 44 to 50 inches from
the tip of their nose to the
fork in their tale (“fork
length”) may be retained.
Fight is on to save salmon from toothy invader
By COURTNEY FLATT
Northwest Public
Broadcasting
The fi ght to save Colum-
bia River salmon could hinge
on a major battle taking place
in the basin’s biggest reser-
voir. It pits biologists against
a fi sh: The invasive northern
pike.
Northern pike are aggres-
sive. They eat anything in
their path — they’ve even
been spotted chomping on
ducks and bats. That’s bad
news for soft-bellied fi sh, like
rainbow trout. “These pike
here, they can really prey on
a lot of fi shes that these other
fi sh in the reservoir right now
can’t,” said Travis Rehm, a
fi sheries biologist with the
Spokane Tribe of Indians.
Rehm is one of the anglers
standing in their way as the
Spokane Tribe and other
fi sheries managers launch a
counterattack. Biologists are
catching as many northern
pike as they can in Lake Roo-
sevelt, the reservoir held back
by the Grand Coulee Dam. If
the fi sh make it past Grand
Coulee and the next dam
downriver — Chief Joseph
Dam — it could be game over
for the Columbia’s threatened
and endangered salmon and
steelhead populations.
These native fi sh popu-
late the 545-mile section of
the Columbia River below
the Chief Joseph Dam, plus
thousands of miles of tribu-
tary rivers and streams.
“Native species here hav-
en’t evolved to deal with
a predator that’s quite like
pike,” Rehm said.
To push back the north-
ern pike’s steady progression,
biologists will be on the water
for much of the summer, set-
ting and checking about 15
gillnets each day. The goal:
snagging as many northern
pike as possible.
Rehm and two other biol-
ogists, Andy Miller and Joe
Cronrath, check the gillnets
within 24 hours after they’ve
set them in place.
These biologists know
where to place the gillnets:
near channels, in shallower
areas, where the northern pike
— apex predators in these
waters — like to ambush
prey. Tribal biologists also set
gillnets for northern pike last
year.
“The hotspots haven’t
changed. The densities within
those have, and they’re just
increasing,” Rehm said.
Gillnets are
controversial
Gillnets are controversial
because fi sh that aren’t being
Courtney Flatt/Northwest Public Broadcasting
Travis Rehm holds up the largest northern pike biologists caught on May 21. The female fi sh
was about 34 inches long.
targeted — like smallmouth
bass, walleye and northern
pikeminnow — get tangled
in the nets. But Rehm said
they’re trying to be careful.
“We’re doing our best to
minimize bycatch and be as
cognizant of everything as
possible,” he said.
All of the non native fi sh
the team catch are gutted. If
people will eat the fi sh, the
biologists deftly fi let it —
along with the northern pike
— and take it to the Spokane
Tribe’s food bank. They keep
the heads of the larger north-
ern pike. Tiny bones in the
head can tell them how old
the northern pike is and where
it’s been. They clip its fi n to
collect DNA, which can help
biologists track northern pike
spawning.
Recently, biologists for
six different agencies took an
“all hands on deck” approach
to netting northern pike.
The cadre saturated known
hotspots with gillnets for a
week. In the end, they caught
439 northern pike.
They especially want to
catch female northern pike
before they spawn. Each fi sh
can have somewhere around
10,000 eggs. Fewer eggs
mean fewer pike in the future.
“We stopped at least
2,160,000 eggs from being
released into the water during
this one week survey,” said
Holly McLellan, the lead
biologist with the Confed-
erated Tribes of the Colville
Reservation.
In a different area of Lake
Roosevelt called the Sanpoil
Arm, Colville biologists net-
ted a whopping 28-pound
female northern pike. McLel-
lan said the eggs from that
fi sh alone weighed 4 pounds.
In this vast reservoir, the
presence of these predatory
outsiders means other fi sh
could be in trouble. In Cali-
fornia and Alaska, northern
pike ate all the types of fi sh
anglers like to catch.
“The (hatchery) rainbow
trout are getting hammered,”
Rehm said.
All day long, biologists
fi nd hatchery rainbow trout
inside northern pike stom-
achs. One fi sh had recently
eaten three rainbow trout.
Illegally introduced
Northern pike didn’t just
all-of-a-sudden show up in
Lake Roosevelt. They were
illegally introduced into
Montana as early as the 1950s
— thanks to outdoorsmen
who took it upon themselves
to bring these game fi sh from
the Midwest by the bucket-
ful to stock Western waters.
N owadays, conservation sci-
entists refer to these folks as
“bucket biologists.”
Since then, the northern
pike have been relentlessly
swimming, reproducing and
eating their way down the
tributaries and lakes of Mon-
tana, Idaho, and Washington
state – all connected waters
that are part of the Columbia
Basin.
Tony Grover is the fi sh
and wildlife director for the
Northwest Power and Con-
servation Council, which
can direct money toward the
northern pike eradication.
Grover said the only times
these fi sh have been com-
pletely stopped is in isolated
waters.
“Any time they’ve shown
up in larger, interconnected
systems, it’s been impossible
to eradicate them. So now that
they’re in the system, they’re
here to stay, almost certainly,”
Grover said.
Once fi sheries managers
recognized the threat these
invaders posed to native spe-
cies, they tried to stop it. The
Kalispel Tribe of Indians
knocked back the northern
pike population in Washing-
ton’s Box Canyon Reservoir
on the Pend Oreille River.
But some fi sh made it past
their nets and on toward the
Columbia.
Northern pike entered
Lake Roosevelt around 2011
and kept moving. They’ve
nearly covered the lake’s 150-
mile length and have been
spotted within 17 miles of
Grand Coulee Dam, where
the Colville Tribe recently
caught the large female north-
ern pike.
Grover worries smaller
northern pike could one day
slip through the Grand Cou-
lee Dam’s turbines. He said it
could be just a few more years
before that happens. To help
with the fi ght, managers are
paying anglers $10-a-head for
any northern pike they catch.
Back at the lake, Rehm
said he’s “cautiously optimis-
tic” they can slow the pike’s
progress.
“If we can get a handle on
them and be able to manage-
ably net them, it’ll be a lot
easier go,” Rehm said.
On this day, Rehm and
the other biologists catch 21
northern pike.
“We’ll give them hell,” he
said. “That’s the plan.”