First of all I want to say I have the utmost respect for Letty Potter. She always has the courage to enter these controversial threads with what she sees as facts, and presents them cordially. Thank you Letty. Many of her statements are correct, but some may be incorrect without her specific knowledge of what has repeatedly been reported on several fishing website BB's; such as what Bremelo and the agreeing poster mentioned happened to them by Indian netters on the rivers. And the guy from Chilliwack has not read closely enough the many posts within, such as mine, in which we specifically said "not all Native Americans" are into resouce overharvest, but many are. That's NOT grouping all Indian people together! Nor are the sportfishermen's complaints here about hook and line snaggers grouping all white people together as poachers. Get some open eyes and get real! And Chilly, you turned around hypocritically and grouped "all you Washington sportys" together as nate bonkers, which couldn't be further from the truth!!! Most of us release nates and would prefer a state reg for mandatory C&R only on native steelhead statewide, as it mostly is in Oregon (one or 2 exceptions if I remember correctly). The problem with that is apparently the idiotic management of the WDF&G is such that when sportfishers don't harvest a certain number of nates out on the OP then the Indian netters get to up their take!?! That is about as idiotic of reasoning as I have ever heard the human race mis-reason! You also said that commercial ocean and river harvest by whites is the main culprit in this problem. Let me inform you that those commercial catches are included along with sportfishers catches in the 50/50 Treaty split equations; and they don't target steelhead! Since the seeming intractable Indian netting is going to continue to take a large number of native steelhead then it's even more important for us sportsmen to C&R these fish to allow enough spawning escapement to occur. If the runs are deemed healthy then let's err on the side of keeping them that way, rather than promote more C&K bonking "or we'll allow the Indian netters to take even more of them"; thus allowing the Indians to go even further above the Treaty law's 50/50 split than they already are going over. That's insanity! mad Who in hell is at the bottom of this fiasco within the WDF&G?!? Someone up there find out and let us all know. Thanks.