Your illustration of the small stream running though your property is a perfect example of the complexity of managing anadromous fish. The streams been closed going on 30 years now--i.e., no fishing or netting pressure, yet it has had 0 steelhead this year. If your property is in the Puget Sound basin, your stream is experiencing what many Puget Sound and BC Georgia Strait streams are experiencing this year with the winter-run--very few fish. And in your case, management had nothing to do with it because there is no fishery on it!

Anadromous fish populations fluctuate wildly from year to year, even with no fishing pressure. If you look at historical numbers for streams with little pressure, you see populations numbers fluctuate by as much as an order of magnitude--e.g., 100 one year 1,000 the next. Why does this happen? This type of population structure occurs so that fish runs have the capacity to recover from even catastrophic conditions. For example, Mt St. Helens and the Toutle River. This run (and river) was destroyed completely by the eruption, but within two decades, what few strays that entered the river and reproduced when the river sufficiently recovered, were able to grow into populations that approach pre-eruption levels. Its only been in the past half decade or so, that WDFW has supplemented the Toutle River with hatchery fish and allowed a fishery. Prior to this, the strategy was hands off except to monitor.

From a management perspective, wide population fluctuations are difficult to handle. You say, leave them alone, and they'll recover. If there's nothing substantially wrong with the watershed, then you're probably correct. The complexity arises in the definition of whats a healthy population when it can fluctuate by an order of magnitude in any given year. If management agencies develop strategies that allow fisheries to occur only at the high ends of normal population densities, you can bet there's going to be substantial public pressure to allow more fishing opportunities. Set escapements too low for too many years in a row, you eat into the populations gene pool and its ability to rebound.

Topping things off, these management decisions are made with insufficient data due in fact that you really don't know what escapements you have until after it happens. All along letting people fish using historical numbers that fluctuate.

Fisheries can be managed much better,....if opportunities to fish are drastically reduced. And oh yeah....50 percent of the harvest is allocated to the tribes through Federal actions, which is largely beyond the control of the State.