If you sit down and really think about it, the whole thing is very hypocritical. Why even bother with on-board observers!? What are they gonna do, just watch the fish die? The fish will do that whether or not the observer is on board, whether or not the "revival tank" is used. It will continue to happen as long as there are nets in the river!!!

Does any agency actually do anything with the information gathered by the observers? Or is having them on-board just all for show? When observers witness and record the incredible "by-catch" of steelhead, does anything meaningful happen? Yeah, I guess that's what you call it when they decide they need to triple their allowable impact on ESA listed steelhead... real "meaningful".

Or how about the original January decision for commercial/sport allocation in Oregon:

The Commission reduced the Spring Chinook sport fishery by up to 28%. Ultimately, they determined that the commercial fleet needed a larger share of the prized sport fish because the netted wild fish cause twice as many mortalities in the commercial fishery than the sport. Wild fish are released from both fisheries, while abundant marked hatchery fish are kept. Nearly twice as many released fish die (18.5%) from the nets as from a sport caught (10%). The rates are even higher for the wild steelhead tangled in the nets.

When that wild springer or steelhead gets dragged aboard, he has lost a good amount of slime and scales. Even if he is "alive and well" upon release, he will likely end up in another net just a few miles upriver. How many times do you think he'll be netted over the next couple of months? Each time having the de-sliming/de-scaling repeated over and again. That fish will never get the chance to perpetuate its genetic fitness... it will be dead of overwhelming fungal infection long before it ever sees spawning gravel. Not exactly the best C&R tool for a selective fishery.

If they really want to know what kind of an impact the nets are having on wild springers, they need something much more objective that measures the totality of the damage inflicted by repeated netting, not just what happens during a one-time netting event.

It would be nice for WDFW and/or ODFW to radio tag and track a bunch of wild springers to see just how well they fare running the gauntlet of nets. That would sure give everyone a much more realistic picture of the mortality impact these nets are having on wild springers. I would bet for damn sure that it's higher than their estimated 18.5%.

Can anyone cite whether such radio-tagged mortality studies have ever been done? Might be an interesting read. Salmo g? S malma? CFM? Grandpa? Todd?