There have been a lot of rumors flying around about the opening of sockeye fishing on Lake Wenatchee. Some folks were checking the E-Regs posted on the WDFW web site and were finding last year’s announcement. Others were checking the dam counts and looking at the difference of the Rock Island sockeye counts and Rocky Reach numbers and estimating the number of fish that turned up the Wenatchee. I have been stopping by Tumwater Dam and visiting with the people that are tracking the numbers over the dam and posting the most current counts on a board. I posted a photo of the board so people can see the actual numbers. It is a couple of days old, and for example, just 400 fish passed over the dam on Monday, so it is a very close call to open the fishery. We need 23,500 for escapement and we want a few thousand fish over that to turn anglers loose on the excess. There still is a possibility, but the return is down to a trickle. Managers want to wait until early next week to determine if there are enough sockeye in the lake and still coming to have a short fishery.
This is the tally board at Tumwater Dam that posts the latest numbers of sockeye that have passed over.