Wild Chrome, I hate to be disagreeable, but I really don't agree with you at all re farmed fish. They are hardly capable of sustaining themselves in the wild, certainly less so that conventional hatchery fish which can hardly spawn at all. And there is no documented record of atlantic salmon successfully establishing a population anywhere on the west coast - the fish you see spawning in rivers are all escapees, but none of their eggs ever survive - local diseases that wild fish have long adapted to are instant death to them. Farm stocks are frail, subject to lots of diseases that native fish have long since developed immunity to, but there is no record of net pen fish infecting anything, in fact the disease sampling protocols for farmed fish producers are very strict. And the annual effluent from all the net pens in the state is just a fraction of the nutrient load coming from Seattle Metro, let alone all the hundreds of thousands of failing septic systems in floodplains and along shorelines.

The positive thing about the net pen industry is that they can undersell the commercials and will eventually put them out of business. I personally detest commercial fishermen - they are souless parasites that would gladly harvest the last fish if we let them, they sell salmon and steelhead for less than it costs the state to raise them in a hatchery, they strip eggs and throw away the carcasses, they do not fish selectively, they routinely "bycatch" fish that they are not supposed to target, they willingly shovel 100 pounds of dead juvenile and bait fish over the side for every pound of shrimp they trawl, they are the willing tools of overharvest and habitat destruction in the worlds oceans, and they have absolutely no business fishing for any fish that a sport fishermen wants to fish for, simply because that sport-caught fish is worth 15 times more to the economy than what their commercial caught fish is. How many hatcheries could we fund with just the taxes collected on the difference in value? Yet here we are, allowing commercial fishing on the Columbia, which is keeping the sport catch down, keeping sport fishermen home, and keeping the econimic return at 1/15th of where it should be, while we are suffering a state budget deficit and closing hatcheries. Why commercial fishing for salmon is allowed at all is way beyond me - makes no sense economically, politically, or even biologically - let the surplus fish head upstream and die like they are supposed to so that our rivers can actually grow fish again.

I never buy fish. I give fish to all my relatives that don't fish so that they never have to buy fish. I release wild fish and target hatchery fish. Why a sport fisherman would buy a commercially caught fish is so far beyond me that I think someone who does has got to be from a different planet. Well, I apologize, but dammit, just the thought of a commercial fishing supporter in our ranks pees me off