Salmo G My point was not to say that the folks at WDFW are undereducated but simply to point out that the best avaliable science is not adequate for them to be making the assumptions they are making.
A little backround on where I am coming from. I grew up on the Washougal river. This is a river that was devastated by every type of problem imaginable. In the early 1900's it had 3 dams with no fish passage, was continually logged, mined and spash damed. it was polluted with mercury from a papermill. After all this there was still a stable population of wild summer steelhead numbering 1500 strong every year. In the 1960's the Skamania hatchery was built. At that exact time wild summer steelhead populations declined. it is an absolute that the hatchery caused the decline. fishermen were the first to notice it, and WDFW did nothing. it was not until the run was critically depressed that they did anything.
It is this type of managment that WDFW is famous for and they are wrong in maintaining this methodology. this indicates to me that Certain members of WDFW managment (who I am tempted to name) are inspite of their education completely and utterly I can think of no better word than stupid! There are some great people in WDFW particularly in region 5 (Dan Rawding) but at the state managment level they are blinded by their education. they seem content to stick with MSY inspite of it massive and clear failure. They seem to prefer reducing escapment goals and keeping fisheries open as opposed to doing the research to find out what the true ability of our streams are.
We are smack dab in the middle of the range for Chinook, Coho and steelhead and I think that WDFW are underestimating the carrying capacities of our streams, In fact to mee the numbers they come up with seem pretty arbitrary to me. As I said before we should be managing to return as many fish as possible to our streams and if we return too many then nature will sort that out on it's own. I know of no instance where having too many wild fish return to the avaliable habitat caused any problems.

Frankly until WDFW changes it's tune there is no hope for the future of wild salmonids, and NMFS needs to stand up aganst the anti-wild fish agenda .