MC: Salmonbelly is right. Poaching is a far bigger problem than many folk know. There are so many a*****ls out there breaking the law you just can't imagine.

I did a piece on deer poaching years ago. Sitting around with the game wardens waiting for some fool to shot out decoy deer was a real eye opener for me. There are a few hardcore poachers the gamies all know, that get busted with great regularity and who seem to get back on the river in nothing flat. Many of these scum buckets have no assets to no job no ambition and simply no ethics. We need much tougher sentencing for poaching, but the uninformed public doesn’t support it. (By the way EVERY time they set out the decoy deer someone shoots it!)

I have already heard several commentators; yes both right wing and left wing, making fun of the relatively hard sentence given to the repeat felon geoduck poachers. The spiel goes something like this "Jeesh, they give a child molester six months probation and yet a guy digging a few extra clams gets ten years.” We all know the clam poacher deserved what he got; as for the child molester the problem is that we don’t have capital punishment for them. The problem IS NOT that we have too heavy sentencing for serious poaching.

I would like to see selling illegally caught fish a felony, with a minimum of one year in jails, and any restaurant selling fish not purchased through legal means shut down for a month. That would stop this crap FAST!