We know the plan for sockeye fishing on the upper Columbia River; the next questions I am getting is about the potential for the opening of Lake Wenatchee. I am a familiar face at the counting station on Tumwater Dam. I check in here almost daily starting about now every year. I stopped by there last Friday and was pleased see they already have a sign up, so we don’t have to bug the staff that is doing the counting. I didn’t see a number of fish on the sign, so I asked the counter, and she said that 100 fish went though last Thursday, and they already had more than that by 5 a.m. Friday morning. I looked at the numbers on the sign last year at this time and it was over 13,000, but that was an incredibly unusual year. In 2023 at this time just over 3,000 had passed over the dam, which is a more reasonable number. Recently, the Chelan PUD fish count site showed that 40,745 sockeye had passed over Rock Island Dam and 21,015 over Rocky Reach. Which means that there could be as many as 19,730 in the Columbia or Wenatchee River heading to Lake Wenatchee. Remember, we need 23,000 for escapement.