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The 2023 Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Season is wrapping up and one ambitious angler will earn over one hundred thousand dollars for their ambitious Summer of catching the unwanted species.
While the Northern Pikeminnow is a species native to the Pacific Northwest it is a species whose population numbers have exploded in recent years. This prompted the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission to launch the joint Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Program giving anglers an opportunity to earn money for removing these fish.
Why Do Native Pikeminnows Need To Be Removed?
The Northern Pikeminnows are predators that inhabit the same portions of the Columbia River as outmigrating salmon and steelhead smolts. Removing these predators drastically improves the salmon and steelhead populations which in turn is healthier for the river and economy.
This program pays anglers per fish caught and this season’s top angler landed 10,755 pikeminnows to earn a whopping $107,800. You don’t need a calculator to recognize that is A LOT of fish they caught and removed from the river, an act that will have a very positive impact on the salmon and steelhead populations.
According to NW Sportsman Mag, the season runs from May 1st to September 30th. And an article on Field & Stream breaks down the payment for each fish caught.
The base price for a caught pikeminnow is $6 for the first 25 qualifying fish of 9 or more inches long. Fish 25-100 are worth $8/fish. And any Northern Pikeminnow caught after the first 200 is worth $10 a piece.
This year’s top angler with 10,755 fish caught marked the second-most Northern Pikeminnows caught in the history of this program. Only in 2016 did an angler catch more and that year the top fisherman landed 14,019 of these unwanted fish.
A total of 156,505 pikeminnows were caught in the 2023 season. That means the top angler accounted for about 14.5% of the total number of this unwanted species landed and removed from the Columbia River.
How The Nothern Pikeminnow Program Works
This really is a collaborative program spanning fertile salmon and steelhead grounds of the Pacific Northwest.
Participants can download an app for the program to track their catches and there catch stations on the Columbia River from Cathlamet to Vernita and also on the Snake River from Pasco to Clarkston with the fishing boundaries jumping state borders between Washington and Oregon. The program’s website has a handy map of all the catch stations across the two rivers.
The same website also has a leaderboard of this year’s top anglers. The fisherman in second place was just shy of 10,000 caught. They landed 9,786 of the pikeminnows for a whopping total of $98,710 earned.
Now, for anyone looking at these payouts and thinking it’s the easiest money imaginable, keep this in mind: fishing is a WILDLY expensive sport. Gear breaks every day. Countless lures, hooks, nets, and bait are lost. Boats burn a fortune in gas. There is truly nothing cheap or affordable about fishing when you are doing it all day every day over the course of several months.
So while earning $107K for catching the most Northern Pikeminnows sounds incredible they probably also spent a small fortune along the way. It also takes a very devoted angler to spend all Summer fishing for Northern Pikeminnows when there are salmon and steelhead everywhere.