I'm more glass haf full on this than most posting in this thread. The past few years were absolutely miserable, with right next to zero opportunity to fish for steelhead north of Willapa or south of the Hoh. We at least get January in the Chehalis tribs this year (as long as they don't shut it down early again), and the Queets is scheduled to be open thru March. That sounds a lot better than closed all season to me.

One thing that seems pretty clear is that the QIN is the decider on the systems they "co-manage." The best evidence of that is the aforementioned Middle Quinault fishery. The reason that has stayed open despite the chronically poor wild returns to the upper basin is that the Tribe takes all their hatchery fish (and whatever wild fish they catch in the process) out below Lake Quinault, leaving virtually no "food for the NT fishers to play with" in the water open to us. In other words, they don't care much about the wild run (they say "a fish is a fish"), so they're content to let WDFW do whatever they want in the middle stretch. The recent closures on the Queets/Salmon have been a different deal, probably because the co-manager there is the NPS (not WDFW). The NPS tends to err on the side of caution with regard to managing wild runs, so they have higher thresholds for proposing closures than WDFW. (Really glad to see that open, at least for now, through March.)

As long as nothing changes (definitely uncertain), we'll have a much better opportunity to at least wet a line than what we have had recently. Good luck out there.