Originally Posted By: Denham
Originally Posted By: Salmo g.
Originally Posted By: DrifterWA

I'm sure its a "good read".......Living in Grays Harbor for 54 years, I watched in real time the dismise of wild steelhead in the Region.

Hoh, Queets, Quinualt, Humptulips, Wishkah, Wynoochee, Satsop were rivers that I caught wild steelhead on. My largest was 26# 11 oz., weighted at the river by a biologist, early 80's, Spring vacation but no camera......grrrr

Caught a 23+ pound on the Satsop....never placed in the SH Derby......

Lot's of things added to the decline of wild steelhead......better equipment, more boats(drift and jet), increase in number of guides, tribal nets, habitat, and just more people fishing.



Not to pick an argument with you, but I wouldn't lay much blame on fishing. I'm not saying that over-fishing has not occurred at times, but it isn't the proximate cause of decline. That is because over-fishing can be cured by reducing fishing. And we have done that. Steelhead, like all salmonids, are very resilient fish. Diminished numbers can and do rebound quickly when the limiting factor is removed or corrected.

The thing that doesn't fix quickly is damaged and destroyed habitat. Fish simply cannot increase in numbers beyond the productivity and capacity of their habitat. Hooten covers so well in his book about the horizon to horizon clear cutting on Vancouver Island that exposed steep, unstable soils (sound familiar?) to heavy rains that produced record floods, that in some rivers, scoured out the gravel down to bedrock. And bedrock is not very productive for aquatic life.

He wrote about biologists sampling and tagging adult steelhead on the Englishman River, which is a small stream. They beach seined 126 adult steelhead in one pool to tag. The entire run in that river is probably less than 126 steelhead these days. The damage to watersheds is huge, and possibly irreversible in some, if not many, cases.


No offense but out of all the talked about factors contributing to low steelhead returns I think "habitat loss" is the most overblown out of all of them. Washington state still has numerous rivers out on the OP which sport the same habitat quality as they did 200 years ago and yet their current returns are just as bad as the rest of the state. Then you look back 40 years ago to the 1980's when Puget Sound steelheading was at its peak. It didn't seem to matter back then what rivers had poor habitat because the Green and Puyallup were pumping out more fish than anywhere else and those are some of the most urbanized rivers in PS.

"Fishing" on the other hand still seems to be pretty prevalent. Between commercial fishermen, the tribes, and pinnipeds you have the three most productive groups of fisherman who all get a crack at these fish in whatever manner they please. They don't worry about what has a fin or not because its all fair game to them. On top of that we commercially fish for all the baitfish out in the ocean limiting what the salmon can eat in the first place.

I will say that recreational fishing on the other hand probably hasn't caused much damage in recent years largely in part because we haven't been given a chance. With all the emergency closures and 1-fish limits of hatchery only fish its hard to make a dent when you aren't given the chance to kill anything. Out of all the groups of fisherman out there I would definitely say that we are the least to blame.





You are not very well informed about the habitat on the Olympic Peninsula. Most people aren’t because they don’t make a living working as a habitat/stock assessment biologist. In reality, it has been very well documented that when compared to even 50 years ago, these OP streams have a drastically reduced carrying capacity in regards to natural production of wild salmonids. You really need to get out there and observe what has happened.

Talk to some professionals that have made spent decades documenting, monitoring, and observing this massively depressing phenomenon.