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FY, from the Tacoma News Tribune-

Recovery box snafus blight tangle-net fishery

Bob Mottram; News Tribune outdoors writer

It shouldn’t be this hard to manage a fishery.

R.P. Van Gytenbeek, a Fish and Wildlife Commission member from Seattle, was the first to call attention to the situation. He did so at a commission meeting in March when he pointed to the experimental tangle-net fishery then under way in the Columbia River.

This is the second year that Washington and Oregon have tested tangle nets there in the hope they will allow more commercial fishing. They’re under study as a possible replacement for gillnets in at least some commercial fisheries, because gillnets usually kill fish by depriving them of oxygen.

Tangle nets are designed to entangle only a fish’s jaw, allowing it to breathe.

The idea is to use the new nets in places where selective fishing is required in order to protect threatened stocks. In this case, the aim was to take fin-clipped hatchery spring chinook in the Columbia while allowing safe passage of steelhead and wild spring chinook.

Commercial fishermen must pull their tangle nets within a certain time after setting, and remove the fish from it. If the net contains nontargeted fish that appear to be in distress, the fishermen must place them in an on-board recovery tank to resuscitate them before letting them go. Oxygenated water is pumped through the tank from outside the boat.

During the first week of the commercial spring chinook fishery on the Columbia, Van Gytenbeek said, commercial fishermen caught about 10 steelhead for every chinook. That was part of the problem. The rest of the problem, he said, was that a lot of the commercials out there fished with no recovery tanks on board or with inoperative ones.

Van Gytenbeek said that information came from reports distributed by chief Bruce Bjork, the department’s top law enforcement officer.

“What they did, they issued warning tickets the first week,” Van Gytenbeek said, “then the chief said they would enforce it hard-nosed from that point. I’m assuming they did.”

But they didn’t. The number of citations issued has been zero.

By March 22, enforcement people gave 25 verbal warnings to fishermen whose recovery boxes were not operating, said Capt. Murray Schlenker, enforcement supervisor for the department in Vancouver. But, after discussions with department lawyers and the local prosecutor’s office, the agency decided it couldn’t issue citations because of the way the regulation was written.

“It said (the boxes) had to be ‘operable,’” Schlenker said, “but not ‘operating.’ Many of them had operable boxes, but didn’t have them turned on.”

Later in the season, fishery managers changed the rule to require that the boxes be operating.

That still didn’t eliminate the problem.

“According to (the rule), if the fish was lethargic it had to go in the boxÊ,” Schlenker said. “But define ‘lethargic.’ It was (the fisherman’s) definition.”

Washington enforcement officers found no one on the water without a box, Schlenker said, and as the season progressed officers did see fish in them.

“We boarded enough boats and talked with enough (people), we were getting these guys to turn them on and keep them running,” he said.

Cindy LeFleur, who helps manage the fishery for the department, says the netters caught and released more than twice as many fish as they caught and kept. They kept 14,797 hatchery spring chinook during a 15-day fishery that started on Feb. 25 and ended on March 27. They caught and released 14,975 spring chinook that had not been fin-clipped, and caught and released 21,600 steelhead.

The department estimates the “immediate mortality” at less than two percent for steelhead and less than one percent for spring chinook, but Van Gytenbeek said that number is “under severe question by a lot of people.”

Van Gytenbeek wasn’t happy about the lack of use of recovery boxes. He also wasn’t happy about the ratio of steelhead to salmon caught, especially in the first week of the fishery.

“The thing it tells me is we should have looked at it the first couple of days and said the chinook are not here, and have shut it right down,” he said. Managers then could have sampled the run until chinook arrived in larger numbers.

“I’m sure that’s something we’ll have in place next year,” he said.