Originally Posted By: Carcassman
The kicker is that the number of salmon in the fishery is minuscule (so the fishery is clean) it is just a majority of the run.


THIS!

An otherwise very conservation-minded steelhead flyfisher was once my host for a weekend on the Skagit. Turns out he was heavily involved in the pollock fishery. When the conversation came up, he talked about how "clean" the fishery was.... millions of pounds of pollock to miniscule numbers of kings in their trawls. "We're NOT the problem"

Yes, I could appreciate his point.... but I wasn't blind to the bigger picture.

Cook Inlet's gillnets are capable of taking thousands of sockeye for every king encountered. Seems "clean" enough for the gillnetter. But those sockeye-directed nets typically snarf up 25-30% the entire chinook return over the course of a season.

CLEAN?
_________________________
"Let every angler who loves to fish think what it would mean to him to find the fish were gone." (Zane Grey)

"If you don't kill them, they will spawn." (Carcassman)


The Keen Eye MD
Long Live the Kings!