Chuckn'Duck, I have to first agree with you about the shameful practices of some "sportsmen". It's disgusting sometimes. This year, on the salt, I've seen more people mistreating fish they've then released, than I ever have in the past. Some education is definitely in order.
However, you also said, "The sportsmen need to be aware that all commercial fishermen are greedy, watershed destroying trolls who leave a path of unregulated destruction and dead fish in thier oily, garbage enrshounded wakes." I agree, I think all sportsmen, as well as the entire general public, should be aware of this. All commercial fishermen ARE greedy. They DO destroy habitat, especially the trawlers. They DO leave a path of (regulated, but rarely observed) destruction, again, especially the trawlers, who basically clearcut the seafloor. Commercial fishermen do leave a lot of dead fish and other dead sealife behind, they even have a polite term for it, it's called "incidental bycatch". I'm not sure that their wakes are that oily, but I know those big diesels aren't the cleanest engines, either. I wouldn't say they leave behind that much garbage, unless you count all the discarded fishing gear, cut loose for one tangled reason or another.
I'm sure since you've been gillnetting for 15 years or so that you've heard of a gillnetter losing all or part of their net, perhaps this has even happened to you. It's an expensive mistake, but it happens. How do you think a discarded gillnet compares to the "miles of discarded fishing line" you talked about? Do you think that net keeps killing fish?
As far as contributions to the economy, are you talking the past or the present? I'm sure when the business was good, your commercial fishermen friends paid their fair share of taxes, but no more than they would have paid if they were employed in some different, licensed occupation. These days, of all the trollers and gillnetters docked at the Fishermen's Terminal in Seattle, how many do you think paid taxes LAST year? How many of those guys are just using them as a tax writeoff, and waiting for a buyback? How many do you think have actually fished in Puget Sound in the last 5 years?
There have been studies done, (and I wish I had links to them) that prove that each fish caught by a commercial fishermen in this state these days COSTS the taxpayers money, (I think about $2.00) and each fish caught by a sportsmen brings about $5.50 back into the economy, through tourism, fuel, equipment, etc. They did a similar study in BC, the difference being that their Fisheries Department made the decision to go after the sportsmens' bucks, and this is a major reason why they don't have the large commercial troll fishery on the west coast of Vancouver Island any longer, and why they are advertising in all of our magazines: "Come up and fish". We can credit our much better coho returns recently to the lack of that west coast Vancouver Island commercial troll fishery, so I wouldn't say, as you do, that "the sportsmen's success rate wouldn't bump up enough to notice".
The issue for me is not how much fishing time the commercials get now, it's how much they have impacted the resource in the past, and how wasteful their practices are now when they ARE allowed to fish. Why is it that the salmon catch counts in this state peaked in the 1910's and 20's? Do you think all those canneries had anything to do with it? This was long before the big dams, a bit before any major deforestation... habitat was not the issue, harvest was, and the greedy commercial fishermen took what they could.
For every "tightly regulated" commercial fishery, (acually just means "observed") there seems to be some other almost unobserved fishery... how about the thousands of chinook (some say 40,000+) killed & thrown back in 1996 in the San Juan sockeye purse seine fishery? All "incedental bycatch". That's some botched "catch & release", don't you think? I don't think there is any room for this sort of wastefulness with today's fish numbers. You kill 40,000 in the San Juans, and then we wait for 3,000 escapement to return to the Green river. It doesn't make sense. You speak of the bad catch & release practices of the sportsmen, well how good are your commercial buddies at doing it? When that purse seine is pulled, how many of the unwanted fish at the bottom of that purse do you think will make it out alive? How much of the sealife that's hosed off the deck of the trawler after the net's been emptied do you think is going to live? How about those non-targeted salmon you catch in your gillnet? Were they still moving when you threw them back, or were they long dead? Were they bleeding from the gills, or did they never even get put back, but somehow made it into one of the crewmen's coolers? (You may not do it, but don't tell me it doesn't happen.)
If you want to fish commercially in non-wasteful ways, I'll support that. You might not like it, you probably won't make a living at it, but that's how it goes. I visited Newfoundland in 1981, they were still handlining cod in small, inshore boats there then. It was a thriving, fairly sustainable fishery, and had been for four generations. They had a saying there... "fish or get out"... it was the only thing to do there. Those guys worked hard, in harsh weather, just to scrape out a living. I admired them. Just about that time, in the 80's, the big offshore trawlers started up. They came in and, in less than a decade, wiped all the cod off their spawning grounds in deep water. They put the all small inshore guys out of buisiness. There hasn't been a commercial fishery to speak of there since 1994. You want to talk about economic hardship??? Go to Newfoundland.
I don't think anyone is "pulling the rug out" from under the commercials here, They should have seen this coming, it's been a steady decline for decades, if that's not enough time to shift gears and retrain for a new profession, I don't know what to tell you.
One problem I see is that commercial fishermen don't tend to view themselves as a big group... you're a non-tribal gillnetter and crabber, so you don't really equate yourself with the trawlers, longliners, seiners, or even the tribal gillnetters, for that matter. I'm sure you say, "Well, yeah, those trawler-processors are wasteful ships, but I'm not like that". I see all of you as basically the same. You are all doing it for MONEY. Because you are doing it for money, and because of the way you are regulated, you tend to adopt quick, wasteful, and sometimes insanely dangerous practices, that simply aren't neccessary.
So go ahead, keep fighting to get the right to net that last wild salmon (or hatchery, no wait, I forgot, your nets catch both!!), in the end it might just be some Chilean farmer that saves the Northwest's salmon, by stealing your market away.

-N.

[ 07-29-2001: Message edited by: StorminN ]