Here are my comments on the Willapa Policy and honestly I think I am looking though the rosy red glass as it will probably be worse than I think in the future unless the Commission acts and soon!

My name is XXX and we have spoken in the past. I am writing this in regard to the Willapa Policy. Shortly the Willapa review for 2018 will be completed and frankly I am deeply concerned that nothing will change. The best I can tell is that the main focus for the agency is the 20% or 14% harvest impact which to be honest is smoke and mirrors because it simply does not matter.

I have attached a preseason run forecast for Willapa for 2018 with the RR tab by system and I urge you to look to the RR by system tab. You will see the following for the Naselle River.
2014 975W 4150 H .81% straying
2015 483W 1048H .685 % straying
2016 597W 1786 H .749% straying
2017 1172W 403 H .256% straying
2018 499W passed upstream and 244W into the hatchery brood. The RR ( run reconstruction ) is not available yet but the 499 is the escapement minus the staying but I assume it will be similar to 2017 at about .256 straying rate.

Mr. XXXX the returning adults off of 483( assuming they reproduce themselves and some for harvest which is debatable ) is so low that at 14% it is a 67 allowable impact and 20% is 97 allowable impacts. This the total allowable Naselle W impacts for all the Willapa terminal fisheries. Sir I doubt you can even fish for Chinook in the Willapa estuary in the future and to further complicate the issue look to the 244 into the hatchery brood ( if similar to last year ) which will take away any gains to the natural spawners are able to produce and I doubt there will many gains but rather simply hold the Naselle River at, give or take, right where we are now.

When the Commission adopted the Willapa Policy I advocated splitting it into two regions, North and South, and manage them separately but the policy as adopted opted for the current policy. I did not support the concept but accepted it for this one and only reason which revolved around this simple statement by staff. " We cannot stop the straying of hatchery Chinook on the Naselle." For myself I simply accepted it and basically shut my mouth because if that was the case the straying would support the NOS . That was a serious case of bad judgment. I say this because now we are told the straying has been stopped ( see RR by system tab ) which means a hybrid hatchery stock, that is the poster child for what a hatchery stock, is now a standalone population. the simplest way to grasp the gravity of the situation is to do a simple exercise. If stream XX has a escapement of 8000 of which 6000 are hatchery strays and 2000 wild ( this is similar to the Naselle ) and you now reduce the straying from 80% to 25% you end up with 2500 W & H spawning naturally. I cannot see any way that 2500 adults will produce what 8000 previously did when all H & W are a hatchery hybrid regardless if it has fin or is clipped, they are the genetically the same fish.

The actions taken in the Willapa Policy and the agencies implementation and actions since resulted the total destruction of both commercial and recreational harvest. Simply put sir this is a scorched earth attempt to save a wild salmon that is not a wild salmon, that has little or no chance to remotely succeed with current marine harvest by Canada & BC, and if by some wild chance that the Naselle achieved escapement it will take three generations ( 15 years ) to stabilize as a naturally spawning hatchery fish, and over a hundred years or more to develop genetics that tuned to the environmental conditions that are the Naselle River.

The numbers presented by the RR dictate a very grim picture for the next five years regardless of any action the agency or Commission take. Each year the Commission fails to act simply adds another year to the pain. So when does the Commission address the issue? Now or five years, maybe ten, maybe never. Just when is the Commission or staff going to tell the Willapa Community just what WDF&W under the auspice of the Commission has done to their cherished fisheries in the name of preserving the natural spawning Chinook which do not truly exist.

It is time to fix this thing and it needs to be done now. Options are available but the current policy has failed miserably. WDF&W has went out of their way to insure that the local community did not and does not understand the true dimensions of this fiasco. The dishonesty has been and still is one most unbelievable I have seen in my 70 years and it needs to stop. Whatever the outcome honesty and true transparency needs to be restored by WDF&W to the Willapa Policy conversation.

The Commission needs to find a way to address the failure of the policy to accomplish the simplest task in a meaningful manner. The Commission needs to address this issue in a serious manner and in simple terms fix the bloody thing. The Willapa Policy as executed has not and will not help the natural Chinook but it succeeded in destroying the Willapa fisheries. If that is the Commission's description of success then I doubt much of a future exist for any fisheries in Washington State be it commercial, tribal or recreational.