Trinity River Fishing Report -         SPECIAL  
Proposed Trinity River Spring Flows Feb. 24, 2012

Last Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012, I attended the Preliminary Water Flow meeting in Weaverville at the TRRP offices. I had predicted that this water year (2012) would be slim and stated it would be somewhere between a Normal Water Year and a Dry Water Year. I was way off as I found out that THIS year would be most likely a Dry vs. Critical Dry Water Year. This means that the maximum flow releases for the Trinity will be no more than 4,500cfs but most likely less and that the allocation for the Trinity River for 2012 would be some where in the neighborhood of 405KAF. A Dry Water Year would normally call for 453KAF (thousand acre feet) for flows down the Trinity River, but because this has been such a low snow pack/precipitation winter water storage for the Central Valley Water Project storage system is predicting to be in the area of 70 – 50% of normal. Although we received 0.6 inches of rain last night NOAA’s long range predictions (next 40 days) is less than 5 inches for the spring. That is not very good for the rivers nor the farmers. When you add to that the prediction that this could be a very good salmon return year we could possibly see a situation very similar to that which happened to the Klamath River Basin in 2008 and we experienced a large “salmon die off”.  I am not trying to be a “Dooms Day” predictor but only trying to fore warn my fishing readers of what could be in the future for us.

The next meeting of importance will be on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012 at the Sonoma Water Agency, 404 Aviation Blvd. Santa Rosa, CA, 09:00am – 2:30pm. DFG will be presenting the preliminary salmon counts for formulating the 2012 salmon season. From my information from the DFG people, it is looking very good for a strong salmon return this year.