"It's about keeping WDFW and the Wild cat steelhead club ( who proposed the idea) from killing off the wild fish in the Skagit."

Labeling a well known steelhead club as wild steelhead murderers is near as close to stereotyping as you can get. ?

This is the same group that volunteered to become volunteer watch dogs on the Samish River so we could fish hatchery chinook in that river after many years of not being able to fish it.

Many studies have shown that even after years of planting hatchery fish in a river...genetic introgression between hatchery fish and wild fish has not occurred. Planting smolts as Plunker pointed out will relieve the in river competition between wild and hatchery juveniles.

RA3 I really do wish in many ways that we could return the status of our salmonids back to the way they were 200 years ago.....hatcheries or not it just isn't going to happen in the Puget Sound basin. The human population in that area will grow and will tend towards being an urban community. They will still need more blacktop for rods and malls; lumber and stone for construction; agricultural products for their tables; water for their lawns and golf courses; and the list grows. They will talk the talk of the mystical deception of their connection with salmon...but will they walk the walk? The state our salmon resources are in and the solutions are a social and cultural problem that has and always will be very much larger than the argument over hatcheries. 200 years ago was 200 years ago...today is today....lets try to deal with the future with the full frank realization
that we can reshape the world somewhat but theres no going back 200 years?