Homer,
I don't understand your point about taking away half of the chums. A CR season wouldn't take away any, though some small percentage would be accidently killed.

Smalma,
Thanks for your detailed reply to my question about escapement goals. I didn't understand the differences in the smolt stages of chum vs steelhead. And I guess I still don't understand why MSY is the right way to set escapement when the runs are this large. If I understand your explaination, the escapement goal is this high, simply because the Skagit is capable of supporting this many fish. Why is this important when there are so many fish? I certainly wouldn't advocate a CR fishery that threatened survival of the species, but believe that the impact of CR on a run of 100,000+ to be a pretty small percent of the total, which is probably negligible compared to all of the other effects on survival. (I'm comparing this to the CR impact on a steelhead run of only 6000+ fish.)

And I plead guilty as charged to not being involved, thanks for the constructive suggestion.