I'm afraid I beg to differ slightly with Salmo G re the Hood Canal summer chum program.

First, I will acknowledge the the HC summer chum supplementation effort is among the best designed hatchery programs in the region. If nothing else, it includes a sunset for the program, something very few others have. (However it does not include unsuplemented reference streams, as the ISAB recommends; it is an accepted conerstone of science that conclusions are dangerous to draw without "control" groups for comparison.) Like SG, I am not sure if it has actually sunsetted yet.

Nonetheless, I will also acknowledge that it's results so far are reasonably promising. However, he is jumping the gun and overstating his case (not to say being vacuous) to call it a success, and is taking a position that the operators of the program are not even prepared to take, at least in personal communications to me. Simply put, you cannot know whether a supplementation effort has been successful until several salmon generations AFTER the program has been discontinued, to see if the population can sustain the increase in productivity on its own, without the ongoing demographic boost the continuing supplementaion effort provides. No responsible scientist or manager would claim otherwise, certainly not the by and large thoughtful and responsible managers running the HC program.

Again: the preliminary evidence from the HC program notwithstanding, the foundation of this proposal, that hatchery salmon are capable of contributing to the recovery of ESA- listed wild populations, is completely unproven. Maybe it can work; I continue to be skeptical, but who knows. The point is, again, that "maybe" should not be good enough to base an entire recovery strategy on.

(BTW Auntie: almost all listed stocks of salmon and steelhead suffer allowed direct harvest, including Puget Sound chinook, and most listed Columbia River stocks, including ENDANGERED upper Columbia steehead, which enjoy direct harvest pressure from sport anglers on the Methow.)

Ramon Vanden Brulle
Washington Trout