FPN....I usually read all your long posts all the way through and find a common "thread" which is a passionate pleading of your cases. The problems I see in this thread are that your contentions are not 100% on target and you tend to belittle or insult those who don't agree with your conclusions.. Good rabble rousing to fire up the troops against WDFW but not necessarily a factual thesis.

The current change in regs allowing harvest of "wild" Coho after August 29th is a trade off. Sports fishers give up 5,000 Chinook from their quota to the trollers. In return the sports fleet including the charters will get part of the commercial quota of Coho. A simple trade off. Mark Cedargreen helped negotiate this deal which certainly helps his constituancy which is the chareter boat fleet. It also helps the rest of the sports fishers who want to harvest a nice ocean Coho and take it home.
As hard as we try we cannot catch the Chinook we are offered before the end of the season sometime in September around the 19th or so. We had the same situation last year. As hard as Steve Ng, Fishnut and I try we cannot get enough Chinook. So we give up something we are demonstrably unable to harvest in return for the opportunity to harvest some of the unclipped Coho that are in such abundance.

Before this weekend when more hatchery Coho were available , the ratio was about 65% wild to 35% clippped at best. If you are so close to Mark he has certainly told you that each passing year since the release of wild coho was mandated brings a higher and higher percentage of wild fish. In fact, Coho hatchery releases has been going down due to the increase in wild stocks. So I'm sure Mark would tell you that at some point the wild stocks can and should be harvested. Not just mortality during CNR but actual retention of wild Coho is overdue. So there is now a debate as to how long wild release needs to continue.

Now to mortality. I think the 80% mortality is riduculous and has no basis in science . That kind of claim is what comes out when passion shifts gears into fanaticism. Sorry but it just doesn't wash. As AuntyM so aptly pointed out, the ocean coho seem more fragile than river coho. I have explored this question after releasing so many large wild Coho as carefully as anyone could possibly do last year. I am still not convinced why so many seemed to float away last year. I have watched carefully and most if not all swim away eventually. This year I have released ocean Coho and none floated at all but all immediately swam away. No double mooching leaders with tiny hooks to land in the gills. Some purists who only mooch probably do kill a larger percentage of Coho to gill hooking. I usually am using a single barbless Gamakatsu and release with the stick without removing any fish from the water. More people are doing this than you give credit for. The WDFW folks have given away thousands of the release sticks and spend alot of time with education. To say they are lame in that dept is , again. off the mark. It is a cheap shot to automatically blame WDFW all the time. It just isn't that black and white.
And the charters I have watched this year seem to leave the net in the water with that 10' handle while they determine whether the fish is wild or clipped. Not one of the charters I watched tossed any fish overboard nor did I see any mishandling. Sure a bunch of mishandling still takes place in all fisheries but peer pressure is slowly working to turn that around.

I , too, have talked to Mark about the circle hooks and if I am not mistaken he is not impressed with the supposed benefits and neither are his charter captains. My guess is that using these with rookies may alienate more customers than they are willing to risk. Not saying it isn't a good idea but maybe not now.

One last thought...It is important to remember that most of us here on this board are not amateurs and probably pay more attention to things like CNR and such...The vast majority out there want to take a fish home...especially those on a charter boat. Those are the folks who have no boat and don't fish much but they sure enjoy the experience. Releasing most of the fish brought to the boat is not what they had in mind when they dropped the $80+ to go out for the day. If you are one who releases most of their fish like me then you have your way of doing things and these other folks have theirs. They are not idiots or rapists of the resource or whatever derrogatory adjective some toss their way. They are just average people who want to catch a fish and take it home to the barbecue.

If we revive a run to health do we continue the emergency measures? that is the debate.