I can remember early in my salmon fishing career (1950s) the minimum size for Chinook was 12 inches. A few years later there was no minimum size limit but a size limit reinstated a couple years later. I do vividly remember a boat return to Bellingham in the mid-1970s with a 9 Chinook limit placed in a 5-gallon bucket with the heads down headfirst and the tails of the larger fish were only a couple of inches above the rim of the bucket.

Regarding the Elliot Bay net pen releases being nearly all unclipped. The same holds for the tribal produced fish released in the Green. But what is especially interesting is as far as I can tell those are the only hatchery coho being released from Puget Sound hatcheries (State, Federal or tribal) that the vast majority are not clipped.

Curt