Steelheaders!

PORTLAND — Saturday we stopped by the NW Steelheaders Association banquet dinner. Norm Ritchie, NWSA executive director, was on hand to welcome FIN and the salmon wranglers into Oregon. Many at the dinner had just come in from a day on the Columbia fishing for the spring run of chinook salmon. In Washington, in river and on the coast, fishing has been severely restricted because of the collapse of the Sacramento River fishery, which triggered the first-ever complete ban of commercial fishing south of Washington.

West Coast fishermen often ply the same fishing grounds so a significant decline in runs on any one of the major salmon rivers (Columbia-Snake, Klamath, Sacramento) impacts the livelihoods of fishermen and their communities up and down the coast.


Save Our Wild Salmon volunteer extraordinaire Jan Weihmann and her husband Joe attended the dinner with the salmon road show and were kind enough to welcome three road-weary travelers and a 25-foot salmon into their home. It took some wrangling, but Nate, Bill and Joe managed to strong arm the 2,000-pound FIN and her trailer into her concrete bed for the night. Thank you Jan and Joe for your hospitality and all of the work you did to help make the Portland stop a huge success!




This is my furry, night-owl friend Andy :)