The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife will deliver an extra quarter-million spring chinook smolts to the Youngs Bay net pens in mid-March in an attempt to improve survival and catch rates of salmon throughout the Columbia River and its tributaries.

The smolts will come from a group of 2.2 million hatchery chinook salmon bing raised on the Clackamas and McKenzie rivers. They will be added to about a million fish already scheduled for release from Clatsop County’s Youngs Bay net pen fishery.

The move is likely to boost both sport and commercial fisheries at the mouth of the Columbia in 2013, but it has generated rumblings about whether the state is planning to shift commercial gillnettters from the mainstem river to off-channel areas.

Some sportfishers gripe that the move takes fish away from recreational fisheries in the Willamette River system and delivers them to the commercial fleet, which is allowed to catch a large portion of the Youngs Bay returns.

“The debate is already raging,” said Rick Swart, public information officer for ODFW’s Northwest region. “The sport guys are saying, ‘Why are you talking our fish? We don’t have enough fish as it is, and now you’re taking them away.'”

Biologists are predicting a 10-fold increase in survival and catch rates for the fish if they are released from Youngs Bay as opposed to the upriver tributaries because they will be bigger and closer to the ocean when they swim free.

“While they’re in the net pens, they get a little bigger, a little stronger, and they swim right out from Astoria into the ocean and don’t have to run the gauntlet down and back,” said Swart.

The fish will be released from the net pens in March or April next year when conditions are favorable to spring chinook out-migration and return three years later.

The transfer was directed by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission based on input gathered from recreational anglers, commercial fishermen and tribal representatives during a series of public meetings last year. The purpose of those meetings was to decide salmon harvest allocations for the various stakeholders that harvest salmon in the Columbia River and its tributaries.

“It’s a good thing all the way around for everybody,” said Bill Hunsinger, a Port of Astoria commissioner who sits on ODFW’s Commercial Fishing Advisory Group. “It’s a good move for sports too because they fish those fish right in front of Youngs Bay. I?think it’s a win-win.”

Every year, sport and commercial fishers fight over who will get a bigger share of Columbia River spring chinook.

Last year, sportfishing interests floated a “SAFE for Salmon” plan that would beef up the off-channel net-pen fisheries for gillnetters and give sport-fishers more access to fish in the mainstem Columbia. A bill to implement the plan was brought to the state Legislature earlier this year but didn’t get enough support from lawmakers. Commercial gillnetters opposed the plan because ultimately it would mean they would have to give up their mainstem fishery, and they argue there isn’t enough room or enough fish in off-channel areas for the entire fleet.

Young’s Bay is one of four sites in the lower Columbia River that ODFW has designated for its Select Area Fisheries Enhancement (SAFE) project, an experimental salmon stocking program funded primarily by the Bonneville Power Administration.

The idea is to reduce the impacts of fishing on wild and weak upriver salmon stocks by increasing the availability of hatchery fish in off-channel areas of the lower Columbia.

“We hope that by creating a larger return of hatchery salmon in the SAFE zones we can protect upriver stocks and provide more fishing opportunity for everybody,” said Steve Williams, deputy director of ODFW’s fish division.

Swart said if the state intends to move more commercial fishing off the mainstem, stocking the SAFE zones is an essential step in that process.

“In order to steer the commercial guys into the SAFE zones, you’ve gotta have some fish for them to harvest,” he said. “We can’t say, ‘You go fishing in Youngs Bay’ when there aren’t any fish in there.”

Hunsinger said while the transfer of fish to Youngs Bay will be good for sport and commercial fishers and the local economy, he doesn’t think putting commercial boats exclusively in off-channel areas is a solution to the ongoing fish fight.

“That’s not an answer – jamming everybody in there, 50 feet apart, trying to catch that fish,” he said.