Here's another thing that's wrong with the Quileute - the Tribe and the Corps of Engineers has armored basically the whole estuary to prevent the river from forming a delta, and they have dramatically increased dredging to keep the river open for navigation. They also raised the training wall on the boat basin, filled in the last of the high intertidal wetlands on the reservation and built their fisheries center on it, and rebuilt the marina using creosote treated piling. Oh yeah, built a nice new boat launch too, in one of the few areas of the marina that had any saltmarsh left. Basically there is almost no place left for smolts to adapt from life in freshwater to life in saltwater - they just shoot out the armored navigation channel right into the mouths of rockfish and lingcod. I would suspect that survival of juvenile salmon leaving the system has gotten very low. Most of this occurred about 4-5 years ago - just the right timing to cause the depressed run we may be seeing.

It's not just poor management that has caused Puget Sound fish to nearly go extinct - most of the river mouths in Puget Sound have been treated just this way. It's another part of the problem frown
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The fishing was GREAT! The catching could have used some improvement however........