FB,

If it looks like a screw, walks like a screw, etc.

The Nooksack has been managed as a hatchery wipe-out fishery for fall chinook and coho for over 30 years. In order to harvest the many surplus hatchery salmon, high harvest rates have more likely than not extirpated any significant "native, wild" populations. Wild spring chinook do occur and perhaps some wild early or very late running coho continue to persist, but I've heard of no evidence.

The regulation to release unmarked salmon at least occupies the moral high ground, even if it's completely unrealistic in terms of sustaining natural production of native stocks. The recreational fishery can, as a practical matter, release unmarked salmon with a high probability for survival to spawning. Not so the purse seine and gillnet fisheries.

So even if your aren't "saving" the wild run, since it doesn't exist, releasing those unmarked fish should make you feel a tiny bit better for doing a good deed on behalf of natural production that could sustain itself if the commercial fishing were ever to be restrained from overharvest.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.