This is my own personal opinion as a concerned steelhead angler in the State of Washington.

The letter:

Dear Commission Members,

I am writing in support of the harvest moratorium on wild
steelhead in Washington State.

Washington State is blessed with many species and runs of
anadromous salmonids...but none inspire the mind or fishing
passion more than the steelhead, our state fish.

Our state fish is in a state of decline all over its range, from
California to Alaska, due to various factors, including dams,
past and present poor hatchery practices, destructive forestry
practices, exploding population growth, water withdrawals, and
harvest pressures. Nowhere are all of those factors any more
present than they are here in Washington.

As fisheries managers learn more about hatchery activities that
help or are benign to, rather than harmful to, steelhead through
processes such as the Hatchery Scientific Review Group, and
forest managers struggle with maintaining timber economies and
demands while protecting or even enhancing wildlife, and better
hydropower practices reduce dam mortality, the fish continue to
slowly slip away.

On the few streams open to steelhead harvest (over 90% have
closed to harvest by default, as their runs are chronically
underescaped, perhaps with no recovery in sight), harvest is
intense. Tribal and sport fisheries harvest up to half of some
of the runs on the Olympic Peninsula. Poor run size predictions
have lead to intense harvests that have pushed a fairly healthy
run sized to below escapement levels, such as happened on the
Hoh River the past two years.

As managers, scientists, industries, and the public struggle
with maintaining or restoring quality habitat and water for our
fish, we are continuing to harvest them at intense levels.
While changes to hatchery, timber, hydropower, and agricultural
practices will hopefully bear fruit in the future in the fight
to save salmon and steelhead, the results of such changes are
not guaranteed, nor will the results be visible for many, many
years.

Stopping the sport harvest of wild steelhead has a direct and
immediate measurable benefit to the steelhead runs. The ones
that are not harvested will go to the spawning grounds and
spawn.

How many steelhead will a change in logging road construction
save? How about a change in spill regimes at dams? I don't
know...no one does. There's no way to know if they will save
any, for that matter.

How many fish will be saved by retaining the moratorium? Look
at the harvest reports from the last few years...and that's how
many will be saved. As runs increase, more will be saved. As
noted above, this is automatic and immediate...there is no "wait
and hope" here...those fish will not be harvested, they will
spawn, and, all other things being equal, they will give rise to the next, larger, generation of wild steelhead.

Two years ago the Commission took a very forward thinking step
in reducing the limit on wild steelhead from 2 per day, 30 per
year, to 1 per day, 5 per year. Unfortunately, intense harvest
pressure has actually caused the total harvest to increase. As
other steelhead fisheries close earlier and earlier in the year,
and fewer and fewer streams are open to steelhead retention,
more and more fish are being harvested from those few streams
that remain open.

Science, not politics, should be the main consideration when
considering this moratorium. As more and more people go to the
Olympic Peninsula streams to harvest wild steelhead, and the
runs dwindle, and more streams close, and more people go to the
few remaining that are open, there is no compromise that will
protect those fish from overharvest. Not a trophy tag system,
not a reduction in yearly limits, not a size restriction, not a
time restriction. None of those will stop the intense harvest.

Please retain the two year moratorium. Please direct the WDFW,
who is creating a new steelhead management plan over those two
years, to put the health of the fish and their streams first,
and to put management regimes into place that will absolutely
prevent overharvest by requiring very high and scientifically
sound threshholds that must be met in order to prosecute a
harvest fishery, with conservation buffers large enough to
prevent all but the most cataclysmic inaccuracies in run size
predictions, rather than the routine inaccuracies that lead to
overharvest now.

Thank you very much for considering this moratorium, and
together, let's make Washington a state to be looked up to for
its progressive management, rather than one that will wait until
either another state comes up with a good plan...or the fish
just fade away.

Yours in conservation and recreation,

Todd A. Ripley