I can remember in the mid-70s when there was no saltwater minimum size for Chinook; those being the only Chinook I ever caught in saltwater. I think the minimum size was raised a couple times, like Oncy says. The reason was to lower the catch to meet allocation requirements.

One needs to look at the total releases, which were pretty large. But we also had some really large returns, too. Nooksack/Samish Falls were returning, as adults to the net fishery, at or above 100K fish in the mid-80s. I think we used to get close to 20K adult Chinook back just to the Deschutes.

I was not directly involved in a lot of the planning but I am pretty sure that WDF was using hatchery production to get fish back to the Tribal fisheries. I don't think, though, that there was all that much evaluation of actual results. There were some situations where groups were tagged to evaluate so question and then there was no effort to recover the returning adults.

I do remember that by the 90s/00s that there was some economic analysis that showed a single fish in the catch cost $100+ to produce. And the kept producing them for some reason.