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The 2023 Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Season is wrapping up and one bold angler will earn over 100 thousand {dollars} for his or her bold Summer time of catching the undesirable species.
Whereas the Northern Pikeminnow is a species native to the Pacific Northwest it’s a species whose inhabitants numbers have exploded in recent times. This prompted the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Fee to launch the joint Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Program giving anglers a chance to earn cash for eradicating these fish.
Why Do Native Pikeminnows Want To Be Eliminated?
The Northern Pikeminnows are predators that inhabit the identical parts of the Columbia River as outmigrating salmon and steelhead smolts. Eradicating these predators drastically improves the salmon and steelhead populations which in flip is more healthy for the river and financial system.
This program pays anglers per fish caught and this season’s prime angler landed 10,755 pikeminnows to earn a whopping $107,800. You don’t want a calculator to acknowledge that’s A LOT of fish they caught and faraway from the river, an act that can have a really constructive influence on the salmon and steelhead populations.
In accordance with NW Sportsman Magazine, the season runs from Might 1st to September thirtieth. And an article on Discipline & Stream breaks down the cost for every fish caught.
The bottom worth for a caught pikeminnow is $6 for the primary 25 qualifying fish of 9 or extra inches lengthy. Fish 25-100 are value $8/fish. And any Northern Pikeminnow caught after the primary 200 is value $10 a chunk.
This 12 months’s prime angler with 10,755 fish caught marked the second-most Northern Pikeminnows caught within the historical past of this program. Solely in 2016 did an angler catch extra and that 12 months the highest fisherman landed 14,019 of those undesirable fish.
A complete of 156,505 pikeminnows had been caught within the 2023 season. Meaning the highest angler accounted for about 14.5% of the full variety of this undesirable species landed and faraway from the Columbia River.
How The Nothern Pikeminnow Program Works
This actually is a collaborative program spanning fertile salmon and steelhead grounds of the Pacific Northwest.
Individuals can obtain an app for this system to trace their catches and there catch stations on the Columbia River from Cathlamet to Vernita and in addition on the Snake River from Pasco to Clarkston with the fishing boundaries leaping state borders between Washington and Oregon. This system’s web site has a helpful map of all of the catch stations throughout the 2 rivers.
The identical web site additionally has a leaderboard of this 12 months’s prime anglers. The fisherman in second place was simply shy of 10,000 caught. They landed 9,786 of the pikeminnows for a whopping whole of $98,710 earned.
Now, for anybody taking a look at these payouts and considering it’s the simplest cash conceivable, maintain this in thoughts: fishing is a WILDLY costly sport. Gear breaks day-after-day. Numerous lures, hooks, nets, and bait are misplaced. Boats burn a fortune in fuel. There’s really nothing low cost or reasonably priced about fishing when you find yourself doing all of it day day-after-day over the course of a number of months.
So whereas incomes $107K for catching essentially the most Northern Pikeminnows sounds unbelievable they most likely additionally spent a small fortune alongside the best way. It additionally takes a really devoted angler to spend all Summer time fishing for Northern Pikeminnows when there are salmon and steelhead in all places.
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