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The sockeye streaming up the Columbia River in record numbers aren't yet pouring into Lake Wenatchee, but the phone calls from the eager fishermen awaiting their arrival sure are.

And Art Viola has nothing to tell them.

"I've had hundreds of calls. Oh my God, it's just unbelievable," said Viola, a state fisheries biologist whose territory includes the one-by-six-mile lake northwest of Leavenworth. "I've even had people call me from Florida. But I just don't have anything to tell them yet."

Viola probably won't know until mid-July whether Lake Wenatchee will have the sixth sockeye fishery in its history, but this summer's inexplicably immense run justifies that fevered anticipation. The sockeye counts have been running more than four times the 10-year average at Bonneville Dam, where 136,435 have already come through the ladders -- already nearly twice the preseason forecast of 75,600.

Now experts believe the run could end up tripling that forecast size, perhaps even surpassing the all-time record run of 238,000 in 1955.

"It looks like it could be a mega-run," said regional fish program manager John Easterbrooks of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Updated projections comparing the number of sockeye through Bonneville by a certain date with the final run size put this summer's run conservatively at 240,000, using the five-year run-to-date averages. Using the 10-year mean bumps the 2008 run size up to 272,000.

"Either way," said Perry Harvester, who oversees the WDFW's regional habitat division in Yakima, "it's going to most likely be the greatest run size ever recorded at Bonneville Dam.

About 18 percent of that run is expected to be headed for Lake Wenatchee, meaning it will almost certainly exceed the 25,000 to 28,000 necessary to sustain a harvest fishery. That fishing event would attract hundreds, even thousands of boaters, as it has in each of the five previous Lake Wenatchee sockeye seasons, from the first in 1984 to the last in 2004.

"I counted 270 boats the first day they ever had it," recalled Byron Dickinson, whose home sits just back from the Lake Wenatchee shoreline.

The reasons for that angler enthusiasm, and all those boats, are simple.

* Lake Wenatchee is a "terminal fishery" -- the destination the sockeye were headed for all along -- where the water is much clearer than in the Columbia River, and where the fish will be highly concentrated.

* Bank fishing wouldn't work for sockeye at Lake Wenatchee, which is deeper than 200 feet in places. Sockeye prefer cold, deep water in the mid-50-degree range, not the warmer waters near the shore.

* Fancy gear isn't a prerequisite. Sockeye will strike at a simple, unbaited hook, perhaps because its glint reminds them of the krill -- the tiny shrimp-like critters that, in the ocean, are a favorite sockeye delicacy.

* Finally, there's the allure of catching sockeye, whose tasty red flesh typically commands the highest price-per-pound of all salmon.

"It's the same reason there's a craze about the Copper River sockeye from Alaska: Because they're extremely high-quality eating," Harvester said. "They're pretty much the best of the best, right up there with spring chinook as the best-eating salmon around."

For anglers, that's the good news. The bad news is that these are sockeye, the most unpredictable of all salmon when it comes to forecasting run size. It might as well be done with a Ouija board.

"Predicting sockeye is like herding cats," Harvester said. "Of all the species we come up with run-estimates for, it's the one that's the most variable."

"You see a huge fluctuation from year to year," Easterbrooks added, recalling a 1977 run of "about 65,000 or 70,000" into the Wenatchee system that was nearly 10 times the next year's sockeye return. "So it's all over the place. They're very variable. Very hard to predict."

Viola, who will be one of the people making the decision on whether or not the Lake Wenatchee fishery will become reality, said last week that the early returns over Bonneville were making the odds better than any year since 2004.

But since the sockeye have continued their pace through the ladders at Bonneville -- where sockeye counts have averaged better nearly 14,000 daily for the last week-- it's looking more and more like the beginnings of a record run.

That means plenty of biting sockeye in Lake Wenatchee. In 2004, when the total run size was 123,000, anglers there caught 5,410 sockeye, averaging 3.7 hours per fish caught. More than 90 percent of them were wild fish, but all of them were legal keepers -- within the daily limit, of course.

But it also means there are plenty of sockeye Columbia River anglers should be catching plenty of sockeye. For more than two weeks, anglers fishing for chinook have been incidentally catching sockeye and having to throw them back.

Last weekend, though, the WDFW added sockeye to the mainstem Columbia's summer chinook daily limit. Whether or not the anglers will take advantage -- or have much success -- is another question.

"For one thing, the seasons are so infrequent, people haven't really learned to fish for them (in the Columbia)," Harvester said. "But there's great opportunity out there to catch them.

"I'm sure people could catch them using similar techniques to Lake Wenatchee, but nobody's doing it."

When the sockeye start pouring into Lake Wenatchee, though, they will be.