Back at it again,
While I'm still hot about this topic as I will be until the netters quit I just wanted to also include that it makes me sick to think that the WILD chums in the grays certainly aren't the only fish they are screwing with.
WILD silvers in the lower columbia basin are struggling, all the stories of the silvers in the SW WA rivers back in the 60's and 70's that my father and others older than him have told me about make me sick. My dad said back in the 70's you used to be able to walk across the rivers in native silvers in Sept.-Nov. and now there's very few left. Ever since they've been clipping silvers the last couple of years you'd think there would be a lot of incidental natives caught but there are hardly any.
You see a few in the NF of the lewis which could be misclipped hatchery fish and in the EF where they were plentiful in the 70's, you might incidentally catch 1 or 2 a year. It's sick.
It's not all the nets, but they play a large role in wiping out what's left of our lower columbia native fish.
We were supposed to get 17,000 native fall chinook in the NF of the lewis this year, they'll be lucky if they meet they're excapement of 6000 fish. You can tell by the numbers that are being caught in the river. Where did all those fish go??? NETS, NETS, NETS...
We can sit and watch. Or do something before they wipe out the rest of the native fish that we have left.
Sorry so long, but I'm p*****!
Keith