Bob,

My proposal is simple. Implementing it might be a bit complex, but mainly because enforcement of and compliance with regs can be lax in some parts of the state.

I think the wild fish regs should be as follows:

1. An allowable impact on wild fish should be
calculated for each system. I would make this a very conservative estimate based on run size forcasts, etc.

2. If the allowable impact =0 then no fishing.

3. Half of the allowable impacts go to the tribes. Half to the sporties as legally required.

4. The sporties should further subdivide their half of the allowable impacts. One half should be allocated to CNK wild steelhead by tag only for a specific river (like deer doe tags). The other half should be used to hold CNR fisheries.

5. With the permit system for CNK, wild steelhead harvest would never exceed the allowable impacts for a given river. Carefull monitoring of the CNR fishery would be needed to make sure that the CNR folks never exceeded their allowable impacts. This is the part that could be trickey. Since we all know that CNR people have nothing but the best interests of the fish at heart, they would always report their catch acurately.


The only real problems with that might arise with this system is the accuracy of CNR reporting and the fallibility of run size forecasting. So long as the forcasting is very conservative things should be ok.


I think this should be workable, everybody gets some opportunity, the CNR folks get their longer seasons and fish impacts are more rigorously controlled. The WDFW won't like it because it would require more sampling and/or more enforcement.

To support this I say chage extra for the wild steelhead tag applications (like for big game).

Why won't this work? All angelers get opportunity and impacts on steelhead are strictly controlled (unlike under the current WSR regs).

My $0.02