Hammond has roughly 550 year-round residents. For one week in early August this year, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife counted 828 boats and 2,794 anglers passing through the Buoy 10 fishery that starts at this town's marina. That is not a typo. On an ordinary Tuesday, more people were fishing off Hammond than live here.
If you already own a home in this stretch of Warrenton, you know the season is coming before the calendar says so. The RV sites fill first. Then the marina parking lot. Then, by the last week of July, you can't get a table at Buoy 9 without a wait. What most people miss, even the ones who've watched this happen every August for years, is that the crowd doesn't arrive as one steady wave. It comes in pulses, timed to two things that have nothing to do with a weekend or a holiday: a regulatory calendar set by two state agencies, and the tide book.
The Season Opens and Closes Four Times, Not Once
Buoy 10 is the name for both a literal navigation marker at the mouth of the Columbia and the fishery that surrounds it, stretching roughly from Cape Disappointment to Tongue Point. The 2026 season opened August 1, and most people who don't fish assume that's it: open through Labor Day, closed after. It isn't.
This year's Chinook retention rules run on an alternating schedule:
- August 1 through 9: any Chinook, hatchery or wild, may be kept
- August 10 through 24: only fin-clipped hatchery Chinook may be kept
- August 25 through September 2: any Chinook may be kept again
- September 3 onward: hatchery coho only, no Chinook retention
Coho rules are simpler and stricter all season: only fin-clipped hatchery fish can go home in the cooler, a rule that holds from the opener straight through the rest of the year.
What that schedule means for a Hammond resident is that the crowd thins and thickens roughly every two weeks. The middle stretch, when only hatchery Chinook count, pulls out a chunk of the boat traffic because fewer trips are worth the gas and the guide fee to a visiting angler. Then the last week of August, when any Chinook is legal again, the marina fills back up like it's opening day. If your read on "salmon season" is a single six-week block, you're missing the part where the town actually breathes in and out twice inside it.
The Marina Runs on the Tide Book, Not a Clock
The other thing that catches newcomers off guard is that Buoy 10 fishing follows a tide fishery's rhythm before it follows anyone's schedule. Six to nine feet of tidal exchange move twice a day here, and that movement, not sunrise, is what determines when the boat ramp gets busy.
The pattern locals have learned to expect: the first two hours of an incoming tide light up the water near the buoy line and Sand Island, pulling boats out early, sometimes well before dawn. As the tide keeps flooding, the fleet follows the fish upriver toward the Astoria-Megler Bridge and the Church Hole, thinning out the traffic right at the Hammond launch for a stretch. Then, in the final ninety minutes before slack tide, fish stack up again near the bridge and the upper estuary, which is usually when boats start trickling back toward Hammond for the day.
That means the loudest hour at Hammond Marina on any given day isn't tied to a time you could put on a sign. It shifts with the tide table, which shifts every single day. Ask anyone who's tried to walk a dog past the boat launch at what they assumed would be a quiet 7 a.m. only to find the lot jammed with trailers. Check the tide before you plan around the marina, not the clock.
Where the Crowd Actually Eats
The restaurant cluster along Pacific Drive absorbs most of this. Buoy 9 Restaurant & Lounge and South Jetty Dining Room & Bar sit within a short walk of the marina and both lean into the fishing crowd during peak weeks, while The FishMongers, a few blocks down at 1015 Pacific Dr, handles its own share of the overflow. During the open Chinook windows, expect a wait at all three around the dinner hour. During the hatchery-only stretch in the middle of the month, that same wait mostly evaporates, which is as good a signal as any of how tightly this town's daily rhythm tracks a regulation most residents never read.
The Trail Gets Its Own Kind of Traffic
For residents who use the Warrenton Waterfront Trail as a daily walk rather than a fishing commute, Buoy 10 season changes that experience too, just less dramatically. The paved trail runs from Carruthers Memorial Park to the Hammond Boat Basin and Seafarer's Park, and the stretch nearest the marina sees more boat-trailer traffic on the access roads during peak fishing weeks. Further up toward Carruthers, the walk stays what it always is: flat, dog-friendly, with river views toward the Astoria-Megler Bridge and a fair chance of spotting otters or eagles along the water.
The bigger seasonal overlap is coming, not here yet. Elk use this same trail corridor, and the rutting season that brings herds across the path in numbers typically runs later in the fall, well after the salmon crowd has thinned to the September hatchery-coho-only stretch. For a few weeks in October, residents trade fishing traffic for elk on the trail instead, a swap that's become part of the town's own version of a seasonal clock.
Six Weeks, Then Quiet
By early September, once the alternating Chinook windows give way to hatchery coho only, the pulse that defined August settles into something closer to the town's normal rhythm. Boats still launch. The restaurants still see fishing traffic, particularly from anglers chasing coho into late September. But the version of Hammond that briefly outnumbers its own population five to one in a single week has, by then, mostly moved on, following the fish and the tide charts up toward the Bonneville Pool and beyond.
What's easy to lose in a summer this loud is that Hammond's identity as the Gateway to the Columbia River isn't really about the six weeks of Buoy 10 at all. It's about a marina that once hosted a scene from Free Willy, now marked on the Oregon Coast Film Trail, and a stretch of river that Lewis and Clark's expedition finally reached after 28 months on the trail. The salmon season is loud and specific and gone by fall. The town underneath it is quieter, and it's the part that's actually here year-round.
If you're already living that quieter version of Hammond and ever find yourself curious what a home nearby is actually worth in this market, or just want someone local to talk through what the coming season means for property here, PNW Real Estate Experts knows this stretch of the coast well enough to give you a straight answer.
