Well Jerry,

It seems that whether you fish or not on some rivers, the run will decline due to habitat issues. On those rivers, I would not waste the effort. If I were in charge, I would take the rivers that have hopeless habitat issues (it would appear the puyallup is in this class) and turn them into hatchery fish factories (like the cowlitz).

In return, I would stop putting hatchery fish in rivers with relatively intact watersheds like the skagit and put down restrictive harvest rules (ie C&R only, or 1 wild fish per season).
I would spend all of my conservation effort on habitat preservation on these wild only rivers.

I realize this would never fly with the ESA, but I think some rivers are too far gone to easily fix. It is clear that at best half measures will be taken to fix these problems. Why waste the time and resources.

It takes very little time or resources to protect existing intact habitat. We should focus on this first as we get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of helping fish.

Tremendous amounts of time and resources are needed to restore degraded habitat. (It can be done, I have seen it on midwest trout streams.) This should be done only after we have protected everything that is still intact that may be threatened to maximize the benefit to fish.

As for the vancouver island streams, I seriously doubt a 20 fold decline in populations was due to an increase in fishing pressure. I suspect that something has changed in the stream ecosystem. Whether that was caused by logging or depleted salmon runs or natural parasites/predators I don't know. If I am not mistaken, this happened under a WSR policy.

Show me a stream where WSR has created population growth for a steelhead stock in serious decline before the WSR policy.

I'm not aware that such a precedent has been set, yet WSR has been in place in many rivers for many years.

So because it sounds good, we are going to statewide WSR, for lack of a better plan to help steelhead.

Then we as sportsfishers pat ourselves on the back for having "helped the fish".

I think the best thing we can do to help the fish is to leave their habitat alone (ie prevent development, logging, etc). This approach has a proven record of maintaining healthy wild fish populations. It is not glamorous, but it works. It is about the only thing that really does.

It is clear that when we overfish, the population takes a dive, but when we stop they come back (at least salmonids). This has been demostrated repeatedly over the past 100+ years. Therefore overfishing is a temporary, relatively easily fixed problem.

What has also been clear is that when you radically alter the habitat the fish suffer (ie the columbia dams). So, habitat distruction is a permanent, difficult to fix problem.

So I think that all this talk about WSR is at best a half measure aimed at a short term problem.

We would should take the long view and presreve as much habitat as we can while we can, because once its gone, it doesn't come back.

Given the right conditions animal populations will grow exponentially. Habitat doesn't. It is essentially fixed.

There's a nice little friday rant.

As for the vancouver island streams, it is simple. If they were overfished stop fishing and wait a few generations. If the habitat is intact, the fish will come back. If the habitat is degraded they will not.

You cannot have healthy wild fish populations with degraded habitat.