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Zealous Tribal Fishery Casts its Nets for Fat Fall Chinook by Jonathan Brinckman - The Oregonian, September 1, 1999

A thrilled Native American begins putting in 18-hour days
to harvest the profitable fish and earn half his yearly income

CASCADE LOCKS -- The first fish in Clifford Shippentower's first net of the 1999 tribal salmon season was a fat fall chinook, weighing nearly 20 pounds.

Shippentower took that as a good sign.

Tuesday's dawn had just hit the gray clouds over the Columbia River Gorge about four miles east of Bonneville Dam. And a thrilled Shippentower, who as a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation has treaty rights to Columbia River salmon, was nearly sleepless preparing for the season's opening.

This fishery is of enormous consequence to the 41-year-old fisherman. Shippentower will make about half his annual income here in a season that lasts but nine days.

If everything goes right, Shippentower will pull from the river about 500 pounds a day of fall chinook and steelhead trout. His total gross will approach $9,000 if he's able to sell that fish directly to the public -- at roadside stands that went up Tuesday -- at just $2 a pound.

The gross will be smaller, however, if Shippentower can't move everything he catches and is forced to sell to wholesale fish markets. The best wholesale price he can get now, from a "Seattle-area" vendor Shippentower declined to identify, is 65 cents a pound.

Though Shippentower reveres both types of fish, make no mistake: He likes to see chinook in the net. They can weigh 30 pounds or more. A good steelhead, by comparison, weighs 10 pounds.

"Chinook are key," Shippentower said, removing his morning catch from the 25-foot-circumference dip net hanging from a rickety wood walkway suspended over the river. The fish was dropped into an ice-filled cooler bearing the company name, Wolf Song Fisheries of Stevenson, Wash.

Another key, said Shippentower, is full-bore effort. He anticipates 18-hour work days.

Daylight hours will be spent checking dip nets suspended from three specially constructed fishing platforms and nine 400-foot-long gill nets suspended at strategic locations in the river. Nights will be spent tending a drift net on the open river.

"When the fish are here, you've got to make the money," Shippentower said. "You drink a lot of coffee."

Shippentower is one of an estimated 200 to 300 tribal fisherman on the Columbia River exercising fishing rights reserved under 1855 treaties with the U.S. government. A small minority depend on fishing for their livelihoods. Most, however, are like the two men helping Shippentower: Jim Crane, 44, and Tim Hall, 48.

Crane and Hall drove down from the Umatilla reservation Monday night to participate in a tribal tradition.

"Most who are out there are barely covering their costs," said Charles Hudson, a spokesman for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which represents four tribes with treaty rights to Columbia salmon. "They're doing it to exercise the tradition of bringing salmon home to their family, their relatives, their elders."

Court rulings since the treaties were signed have held that tribes be allowed 50 percent of the harvestable salmon, the salmon that biologists say can be caught without hurting salmon populations. Nontribal commercial and recreational fisheries share the other 50 percent.

Preseason forecasts called for 233,670 fall chinook and 328,468 steelhead to return to the Columbia River. Of that, tribes are allotted 59,000 chinook and 15,000 steelhead.

The tribal harvest is expected to be better than last year but only a third of what it was in the late 1980s and less than 2 percent of its historic high, according to the tribal fisheries commission.

Most of the fish caught in the tribal harvest will be "upriver bright" chinook, wild fish that spawn in an undammed stretch of the Columbia running through the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Mixed in among the fish are stocks of fall chinook and steelhead listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, including, for example, an estimated 1,624 Snake River fall chinook (0.7% of 233,670 fall chinook).

The tribal season started at 6 a.m. Tuesday and runs through 6 p.m. Friday; it resumes at 6 a.m. Sept. 7, running through 6 p.m. Sept. 11. A seven-day extension is possible if the salmon run is larger than initially forecast.

Major locations for direct roadside sales include Marine Park in Cascade Locks; Lone Pine in The Dalles; the boat launch near Roosevelt, Wash.; and Columbia Point in Richland, Wash. Sales hours are from approximately 10 a.m. until dusk. Buyers should bring coolers packed with sufficient ice.

Related Stories:
Fish-Buying Public Flocks to Tribal Sales, But at What Price? - Post Register, 9/9/99
Fishing Compact Weighs Fall Chinook Impacts - Columbia Basin Bulletin, 9/17/99