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Super salmon spot will stay open Fish and Wildlife Commission OKs year-round fishing at Hatchery Hole By MARK FREEMAN The upper Rogue River's most productive salmon-fishing hole will remain open year-round for salmon and steelhead anglers beginning Jan. 1 under new sport-fishing rules adopted Friday. The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission permanently opened the river's so-called Hatchery Hole - a 1,200-foot stretch of river adjacent to Cole Rivers Hatchery that at times teems with several hundred salmon or steelhead ready to swim into the hatchery collection pond. The stretch has been closed to all fishing since the hatchery first began operation 30 years ago, but state fish biologists opened it in June and July as an experiment for anglers to catch excess hatchery spring chinook salmon. Anglers caught an estimated 2,000 adult salmon there and, despite record numbers of angling citations, the hole generated enough positive results to warrant re-opening, says John Thiebes, Rogue Watershed District manager for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. Instead of an imaginary line between yellow signs posted on each side of the river, the new casting deadline will be marked by a floating buoy line spanning the Rogue 8 feet downstream of the underwater canal that fish use to enter the hatchery. The buoy line is expected to eliminate the illegal practice of casting above the deadline, an offense that accounted for 60 percent of the tickets police wrote anglers there last summer. The Hatchery Hole was one of several proposals the commission voted on Friday to become fishing law beginning Jan. 1. Others include a lifting of the 3-year-old ban on using small hooks while bait-fishing on the Rogue, Applegate and several other popular steelhead-angling streams statewide. The old rule required hooks size No. 1 or larger while bait-fishing year-round to protect juvenile steelhead and, in the Rogue basin, the halfpounder steelhead that are in the river each fall through winter. But ODFW studies showed the big hooks were no better at allowing the small fish to survive catch-and-release fishing with bait. The new rule allows any hook size, barbed or barbless, when and where bait-fishing is legal. Another change opened Emigrant Creek upstream of Emigrant Lake to year-round fishing. The commission opted against setting new length and bag limits for striped bass. Biologists had recommended several potential rule changes to allow more people to catch and keep striped bass in some river basins. The coastwide limits of two bass more than 30 inches long a day remains on the books for 2002. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.