Let's read that again...
Originally posted by Salmo g.:
"The upshot, is that within legal limits, the number of treaty fishing days per week shouldn't have any significant affect on the number of harvestable steelhead available for you and me."
If it doesn't matter how many days they fish then I guess it doesn't matter how many fish they catch either. Why not just have nets in the water every day of the year. There will still be just as many fish available, Right?
The truth is that the tribal harvest on the Quillayute system has exceeded the sport harvest consistently for a decade or more. Despite that they always want more because the sport harvest is seldom enough to catch what is left of the share even after the tribes whittle it down to less than half.
If you remember right, the tribes threatened to take even more several years ago if the state didn't raise the sport limit to more than one fish per day and something like three per year on that river. That's when the wild fish release radicals went nuts with their protests and stymied the states interest in increasing the harvest.
The result is that the tribes get the foregone harvest and if all retention of wild fish is made illegal then they will get even more. The wild fish release radicals continue to seek total allocation of the sport share for catch and release at the expense of normal fishing but simply end up giving that allocation to the tribes.
Oh Well! At least steelhead make good halibut bait!
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