Oregon fishery managers have postponed a catch-and-release salmon and steelhead fishery on the Columbia River set to open this weekend, and say abnormal water conditions this spring have flung them, and their ability to predict what will happen next, into new territory.

As of Wednesday, only 26,000 of the approximately 160,000 forecasted upriver spring Chinook salmon had been counted at Bonneville Dam, according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. This low count, coupled with the number of fish that fishermen in a recreational fishery downstream of the dam have already caught, is delaying the opener of an annual recreational jack Chinook salmon and hatchery steelhead fishery. This fishery allows fishing from Tongue Point to upriver at the Interstate 5 bridge.

But fishery managers are also looking at extremely high flow levels on the Columbia River as well as cooler water temperatures — basically the opposite of what they were dealing with in 2015 when drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest worsened in the summer and affected fish all along the Columbia River, with water temperatures at Bonneville Dam rising to almost 5 degrees over the 10-year average.

Fishery managers believe the salmon are out there this spring; an early recreational fishery and test fishing yielded plenty of fish, according to Tucker Jones, the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s ocean salmon and Columbia River program manager. It could be that the run is late, or it could be that the heavy flows are holding fish back, fishery managers say.

“We’re at a spot where we’ve never been before,” Jones said.

“This is a very atypical year,” he added. “Environmentally, I think that’s ultimately going to be a good thing for fish but it’s certainly playing havoc with our counting and our predictive ability.”

Heavy rains and a full snowpack in the mountains caused river flows to surge this spring. Recently, fishery managers observed that when the flow was especially high, the number of fish seen at Bonneville decreased.

To set a fishery and declare it open, fishery managers look at total run size predications. They put a buffer around that number, allow some openers and then, before they open fisheries further, look to see how much of the predicted run has started to pass through Bonneville Dam. Since the 1970s, they’ve usually had a good sense of where the total upriver spring Chinook run is at — or at least the first big chunk of it — by early May.

“Since we’ve been looking, back into the late ’70s, it’s never been later than May 12,” said Jones. This year, only about a quarter of the forecasted run had passed Bonneville by today. “But we have also seen flows down the river that we haven’t seen in 50-plus years so we’re kind of outside the bounds of normal.”

Either way, the early recreational fishery has already hit its allowed impacts — the percentage of listed salmon species fishermen are allowed to handle in the course of trying to catch other salmon. Even though fishermen would have been required to release any adult salmon they caught in the postponed fishery, a certain number of released fish likely die — a percentage fishery managers must factor in when they’re regulating fisheries from year to year.

According to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, it is common to close steelhead fishing whenever Chinook fishing is also closed. If it were to be left open, Jones said, “people might inadvertently (or purposely) impact one species when fishing for the other.”

So until there are more fish in the water, fishermen must wait. Jones thinks it could be another week or two “before we really know the full story on this year’s returns.”

Commercial fishermen, meanwhile, operating under separate allowed impacts, have landed 2,194 spring Chinook in Youngs Bay as of Wednesday, according to preliminary totals recorded by the state. In other select areas — the areas gillnet fishermen have been restricted to fishing in since state polices began phasing them off the Columbia River’s mainstem following a fisheries reform policy passed by former Oregon Gov.John Kitzhaber in 2012 — commercial fishermen landed 634 spring Chinook in Blind Slough and Knappa Slough, and only seven in Deep River.