Good topic and debate, but lets not leap to incorrect conclusions. CF, the dramatic decline in Columbia River salmon fisheries is not so much due to commercial harvest as it is the 21 dams on the river eliminating hundreds of miles of spawning habitat. Eliminate all commercial harvest on the Columbia and runs won't come near what they were in the mid-19th century.

As far as the commercial harvest of steelhead, the commercials are required to list all salmonid species--steelhead just don't seem to be caught in great numbers outside of river mouths.

I like the idea of state-wide C&R becoming a rallying point or some sort of fulcrum, tipping the scales to managing steelhead more conservatively. Although whether the ball will get sufficiently rolling to do anything about tribal netting, I don't know. Perhaps it doesn't matter if the fish are managed using a more ecologically based model.

One other point, we lament how people (fish managers) don't listen to us or view the run data as we view them. Bottom line, sport fishermen aren't listened to because none of us are speaking in a loud and influential manner. We are habitually underrepresented at the North of Falcon meetings where crucial decisions are made. We have no where near the financial support or political influence that the commerical fishing lobbies have been able to muster. There is little unity between our various groups. We deserve what we get.

Which gets me back to one of Rich's premises--using C&R as a stepping stone to a change in managment philosophy, or perhaps more importantly, a rallying point to unite sporties. CF was right in his statement that there isn't a lot of evidence that C&R will recover runs. The best we can say is "it can't hurt" (which is good enough for me). This is a large stumbling block in overcoming the decades of inertia of using MSY. It's easy for fish managers to resist change in the absence of hard data. All these shades of gray. But passage of state-wide C&R and essentially declaring the steelhead as a gamefish, may be the first step in making the fish a true gamefish, not to be used as a food source outside of subsistence.