Alright, I tried to stay out of this but I just have to speak up if grandpa and I actually agree on something (sort of).

Grandpa is absolutely right that commercial netting continues to be a major obstacle to salmon recovery in the Columbia. Taken at face value, netting obviously does directly kill more fish than hatcheries. (Anyone who has taken the time to familiarize themselves with the totality of WT's positions will not be surprized by this statement.)

But here's where the "sort of" comes in. You can't seperate hatchery policy from harvest policy; they are fingers on the same hand. Put simply, the nets wouldn't be in the water without the hatchery fish, and they'll never get out of the water as long as the hatcheries continue to produce at current levels. That may be the most damaging aspect of hatchery production: it promotes and allows harvest levels that the wild runs cannot sustain. Hatchery runs do not take harvest pressure off wild fish, they add to it.

It might be true that selective sport fishing could be managed in a way to harvest hatchery fish with less impact on wild runs (it has not been adequately tested), but that would only require production at a small fraction of current levels. The thing that many of you seem to misunderstand is that the salmon-hatchery program (let's leave steelhead out for the moment) has nothing to do with sport fishing. Any benefit to sport fishers is purely incidental. Hatcheries are a subsidy for commercial fishing, pure and simple, paid for with your taxes.

This is actually the sort of thing I'm uncomfortable talking about, because WT by charter takes no position on alocation issues; we do not represent the interests of ANY user group. I've been trying to leave it to you guys to figure out on your own that the harvest- and hatchery-management standards advocated by WT may be more compatible with recreational fishing than you seem to believe.

As far as the "record" runs on the Columbia go, it is a complete illusion. First of all, the runs are comprised of hatchery fish by several orders of magnitude; it has nothing to do with any meanigful recovery of native salmon populations in the Columbia. If you may be satisfied with a future without wild fish and without healthy wild fish habitat, simply because the hatcheries provide you with satisfactory entertainment, WT is not. Second, the run size is NOT bigger than historical run sizes. The runs in the early part of the 20th century (all wild) that this run supposedly beats were subjected to open ocean exploitation rates of 90%, making the actual total runs considerably larger than what we're seeing today.


Ramon Vanden Brulle
Washington Trout