yes, constantly changing seasons without true conservation reasons is imo stupid and will have seriously negative impacts to the sport fishing economies on the impacted ports. there is no economic benefit to combining seasons. during salmon season people will be there to salmon fish, and while i'm sure they'll be happy to be able to also catch and keep some lingcod, it would make better economic sense to keep them separate so some income will come from the lingcod fishing earlier in the year.

we constantly deal with this on the north coast when dealing with halibut issues. to me, it's clear that the state just wants to simplify things to make things easier while destroying the sport fishing infrastructure. looking at the 2004 halibut regulations on the north coast make that clear. changing a historic opening date (and let's not forget that these decisions are made during the fishing season, which makes it impossible for most stakeholders to attend meetings) and then having an open ended date in june is pure insanity for the communities that depend on halibut fishing revenue. changing days to pick good tides may sound great in principle (there's still no guarantee on the weather thank god) but during times of shorter seasons due to more fishermen, should the state be actively trying to shorten this quota managed fishery. time on the water equals opportunity, and let's just pick a set time for the june fishery (tides will be good some years, bad other years). some damn consistency in regulations would be nice to see from the department (especially considering that conservation is not an issue here.)

i'm aware of the budget crisis, but when the crisis subsides, it'd be nice if we had some fishing opportunities and the infrastructure that supports fishing is still around.