The Umpqua River pinkfin run is still happening and should last until the first week of August, but as the fishery winds down, the fishing will become increasingly inconsistant. Right now there are plenty of female pinkfins in the river above Winchester Bay. The South Jetty is fishing well for striped surfperch and fishing for pile perch in the Umpqua River and Coos Bay has been better than normal this year.
Other fish being caught by anglers fishing Winchester Bay’s South Jetty include greenling, black and blue rockfish and a few cabezon and lingcod. Cabezon have been legal to keep since July 1st and the daily limit is one cabezon at least 16-inches in length.
When bar and ocean conditions permit, tuna fishing has been productive with fair numbers of fish less than 40 miles out with a few as close as 20 miles offshore. A recent ODFW report suggested that anglers try to fish water with a surface temperature warmer than 58 degrees with a chlorophyl content of about .25 milligrams per cubic meter.
Eel Lake has been fishing fair for rainbow trout and a few cutthroat trout. The lake also has a good largemouth population with a few smallmouth bass, brown bullheads and black crappies also present. The coho salmon in the lake are not legal to keep. Area anglers wanting to target freshly stocked trout are going to have to wait until the third week of August when Lake Marie is scheduled to receive 800 trophy rainbows.
On Saturday, Jamie Standifer and a couple of friends trolled herring near Reedsport for a boat limit of Chinook salmon weighing between 13 and 21 pounds. On Sunday, two anglers casting spinners at Half Moon Bay caught Chinook salmon weighing 15 and 20 pounds and brought their fish in for photos, but were quite evasive as to color pattern of their spinners. Anglers trolling the ocean for fin-clipped cohos are usually fishing north of the Umpqua River Bar and catching more native cohos than finclipped ones.
Tenmile Lake has been fishing well for largemouth bass and the current issue of Bassmaster Magazine has the lake rated as the seventh best bass fishery in the western United States. However, when stating the lake’s surface acreage, the magazine seems to have only included the surface acreage in South Tenmile Lake. The magazine also seems to have cut by half, the surface aceage of Potholes Reservoir which is also on the list of top bass fisheries in the western United States.
The Coquille and Umpqua rivers are fishing very well for smallmouth bass. Both rivers are receiving fair to heavy amounts of fishing pressure and the numbers of larger bass seem to be greatly reduced in the areas of greatest fishing pressure. Anglers on float trips that cover fair amounts of river mileage are still finding good-sized bass as they float through river sections that have reduced fishing pressure.
Dwayne Schwartz and I fished the pond formed by the confluence of the North Umpqua and South Umpqua rivers. Our targeted fish species was pumpkinseed sunfish, but we hoped to catch a variety of the pond’s warmwater fish species. However, the pumpkinseeds proved most cooperative.
Almost immediately, Dwayne caught a pumpkinseed at least eight inches long and decided to release it without weighing it. One of Dwayne’s fishing goals is to catch a state record pumpkinseed and the current Oregon state record from Lake Oswego only weighed 7.688 ounces and that fish should not have been eligible for an Oregon record since Lake Oswego is not open to the angling public.
The ODFW policy is that large fish caught in Oregon waters not accessible to the angling public are not eligible for state record consideration – and the Lake Oswego pumpkinseed is not the first time the ODFW has ignored its own policy. Oregon’s current state record largemouth bass replaced a state record largemouth that was caught from a private pond in the Butte Falls area.
Oregon state records for warmwater fish are now being kept by the Oregon Bass and Panfish Club and they should follow ODFW policy and de-certify the Lake Oswego pumpkinseed.
So, although Dwayne did not actually weigh his jumbo panfish, there are ways and formulas that allow weight estimates of surprising accuracy. My favorite method involves memorizing a few weight / length ratios for different fish species.
So if you know that a normally shaped 14-inch rainbow trout weighs one pound, then a reasonable level of math skill should allow you to closely estimate the weight of any rainbow trout of similar body shape once you know its length. For examle, a 21-inch trout would weigh three pounds and six ounces – an estimate arrived at by first comparing their relative lengths. The 21-inch trout is one and a half times as long as the 14-incher. It’s also 1 1/2 times as deep (top to bottom) and 1 1/2 times as thick (side to side) So take the 3/2 ratio and cube it. 3/2 times 3/2 times 3/2 equals 27/8 which equals 3 and 3/8. Since the weight of the anchor fish – the 14-inch trout is one pound, the estimate of the 21-inch trout is three pounds and six ounces. The same formula would give you an estimate of eight pounds for a 28-inch trout of similar shape.
Keep in mind that as fish get older and longer, they tend to get chunkier, which can make weight estimates using this formula less accurate and much lower.
To get an estimate of the weight of Dwayne’s pumpkinseed, let’s assign a weight of one pound for a fat ten inch sunfish and Dwayne did say his fish was very fat.
Cubing the length of his eight-inch pumpkinseed we get 512. Cubing the length of a ten-inch sunfish gives a figure of 1,000. To arrive at a weight estimate for a fat eight eight inch pumpkinseed , we divide 512 by 1,000 and then multiply by 16 ounces. The estimated weight is 8.192 ounces.
So if the original premise of a fat ten inch long sunfish is accurate and Dwayne could somehow get his fish to a business with a certified scale without it losing weight and he took the requied photo and got signatures to the weighing – he could have had a state record for a fish species not many people worry about.
But if a fat one pound sunfish was actually ten and one-quarter inches long, rather than ten inches,the estimated weight for Dwayne’s pumpkinseed drops to 7.607 ounces – nothing more than a near miss.
from Pete’s Blog – PeteHeley.Com
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