Chinook Fishing Outlook Looking Strong

With not a lot to be enthusiastic about right now, salmon anglers have something to be happy about: a promising season.

Here’s the San Francisco’s Chronicle’s Tom Stienstra with more:

“They’re coming,” said Keith Fraser at Loch Lomond Live Bait in San Rafael. “We just had a half dozen fish come in on the Salmon Highway (on San Francisco Bay).” This is the start of the annual migration that is expected to peak in September and provides a rare chance to intercept a huge salmon along the route.

The “Salmon Highway” is a nickname for that route. It spans from the Marin coast through the Golden Gate, Bay-Delta and up the Sacramento River, this week with a forecast of a potential “traffic jam” of fish, as Fraser calls it, in the coming month.

Earlier this year, state and federal scientists forecast 473,200 adult salmon off the Bay Area coast from the Sacramento River system. That is big jump from 380,000 last year, a great fishing season (and in 2018, 224,000).