Coho, merganser and otters --- oh my!

I was wrong -- hooray! Big whoosh of fish up after this last round of rains. Leo Cronin was teeming with spawners.
Okay, okay, maybe not teeming. Nothing like the old days when the fish were thick in the stream. But we saw least 10 through the still very muddy water, so it's fair to say there were more, maybe even many more. At least one was a white-tailed female, which suggests she'd already spawned on the creek, and just been hidden from view the last few times we looked. Others looked fresh as could be, no white on their tails at all. One fresh female started a redd just downstream of the eyeletted boulders.
While we admired six fish in the big pool above the culvert, someone yelled, "Otter, otter!" Yikes! A handsome pair slipped into the water just above the riffle, right on the gravel where a coho pair was trying to spawn. The otters swooshed into the stream and roared upstream leaving nothing but bubbles (and some shook-up fish).
At the same time, a big bird with a rusty head and dramatic black and white wings and body zoomed down the creek.
I'd never seen one in flight before, so the black and white was new, but the punky red head suggested (and an iPhone confirmed) a Common Merganser.
Like the otters, the mergansers are native, natural predators: mergansers have spatulate bills and have been known to stick them right into the redds to suck up coho eggs like a salmon milkshake. Uh oh!
Viewers reported seeing four otters at the big logjam just upstream of the eyeletted boulders; others saw six (!). Viewings were reported in the spillway pool under the dam and downstream towards the Inkwells.
And someone said he saw a "huge fish," three feet long. Could it have been a chinook? We do see them in the watershed -- in fact, in our best year (2005/2006), MMWD counted 125, believe it or not. But I don't know if any were seen at Shafter....
It's also time to start boning up on steelhead identification. This is the time they start coming up, and they like to move in roiling, coffee-colored water. Sound like anything you've seen lately?