Sorry Ramon but can't sit on the side lines any longer! You know my buttons!

Clearly give the shape our chinook stocks are in (after all they are an ESA listed species) changes are/were needed in all areas that affect their survival: harvest, hatcheries and habitat. I encourage each and everyone of you to become informed with accurate information, form an opinion and lobby for the changes that your individual ethics demands.

The Puget Sound Chinook RMP is a fishery management plan that attempted to account for all for all sources of fishing mortality in assessing expliotation rates. This includes mortalities in and out side of Washington waters, treaty and non-treaty, commerical and sport. The plan is much more that a commerical fishery management plan.

To illustrate the fisheries that are considered let's look at the impacts for this year's season on the wild Snohomish basin chinook. The RMP for this sysyem called for a maximun expliotation rate on wild stocks of 32%; the approved seasons and the modeled impacts were expect to have a total of 19% impact on these stocks. 28% of the impacts are expected to be in Alaskan and Canadian waters, The remaining 72% of the impacts are in Washington waters. 24% expected to be from tribal fisheries, 6% from non-treaty commerical fisheries, and 42% from recreationl fisheries (infromation from the North of Falcon process). Most of these impacts are the result of incidental impacts from fisheries directed towards stocks other than wild chinook; examples coho, hatchery chinook (Samish river, blackmouth Tulalip bay etc), sockeye etc. The impacts on other system stocks will differ but it is clear that much more than commerical season are considered and any additional reduction of impacts will continue to involve recreational fisheries.

Ramon and Washington Trout are correct in that wild chinook harvest management in the past has a very poor track record. Returning to the Snohomish example the escapement goal (5,250 adults) for wild spawning chinook prior to 1998 was last met in 1980, that is 17 consective years without meeting the escapement goal. Beginning in the early 1990s managment began moving from past management practies to the kind being put forth in the RMP. The escapement goal has been exceeded 3 or the last 4 years with the average escapement for those 4 years being being 120% of the goal. At least on the Snohomish managment appears to be moving towards what Ramon wants; that is "allow chinook escapement to significiantly exceed existing goals for at least two chinook generations...". The question becomes are we comfortable the potential risks in the plan to allow the time needed to see if the populations will responded as hoped. Always our decisions come down to some risk assessments.

It is true that not all populations have responded as well as the Snohomish which gives rise to the question - "why"? In at least some cases (for exmple the Stillaguamish system) the latest information seems to indiate that the quality of freshwater habitats have decline to such a degree that it is no longer capable of supporting the populations of even 25 years ago.

In the 1960s, 70s and early 1980s expliotation rates on Snohomish chinook was typcially in the 60 to 80% range. As shown above that has been reduced to 1/3 of that level. Has any other of the Hs; hatchery, habitat, or hydro reduced their impacts at anything comparable to that of harvesters? While it makes sense to reduce or end harvest first (the benefits are realized almost immediately while it may take decades to realize the pay off changes in say the habitat arena) with out changes in the other Hs the sacrifaces in harvest will be meaningless.

A final point; the RMP did not reduce escapement goals on the Puget Sound systems. Virtually all the escapement goals remain the same. What is new is something called "low bundance threshold" levels. These thresholds come into play when expected escapements (likely casued by extremely poor survial conditions such as that caused by severe flooding)are at or below that level the allowable expliotation in the plan would be reduce to an even lower level as identified in what was called appendix C of the management plan.

The RMP is a complex document that isn't easy to summarize in a forum such as this. If any of you are interested in the details I encourage you to contact one of the co-managers or NMFS for a copy of the plan.

Tight lines
Smalma