Well, I was trying to provide information. I guess no good deed goes unpunished when you're trying to talk to people who won't do a little research and think for themselves.

First, the sporties catch a lot more springers than the commercials do. I'm not going to waste my time going to the Compact site, you can do it yourself. My recollection is that the sporties got around 49,000 fish last year, and the commercials got around 23,000. You can look it up on the Compact site. For the math challenged among us, that means we got more than twice as many.

The sporties caught more springers because a) we got a greater allocation of the wild fish impact and b) our calculated kill from handling was at a much lower percentage than the commercials. I don't know about the sealions, but they got a few of mine.

Second, I don't know why you are arguing about the commercials. My point is precisely that they could reduce their estimated impact rate, and therefore increase their catch, by working as a group to improve their practices. They have a great deal to gain, in actual cash dollars, if their practices as a group improved. They could reduce their impact to about 15% with good practices, which would let them fish twice as long. But they, like a lot of ignorant and bullheaded sporties, are convinced they know better than the disinterested people monitoring and measuring what really happens. So they continue spouting a bunch of suppositions that they would like to believe are true, while ignoring hard data that is being collected by professionals.

The government didn't kill our runs. We did. We did it by overfishing them, by destroying spawning habitat, by wanting electric power, flood control, and irrigation so we dammed everything in sight, and by omitting fish passage facilities on things like the Dvorak dam in Idaho, and the Cowlitz, Diablo and Elwha dams in washington. Some of the dams are public, some of them are private, they all block salmon runs.

On the other hand, thanks to the Magnusen Act (that would government for the civics impaired), we have federally funded hatcheries. These are paid out of scarce tax dollars, so in the coming eras of skyrocketing deficits, it is likely that hatchery funding will be further reduced. The Endangered Species Act (government again) is the hammer behind most of the salmon recovey efforts today, though the current administration seems bent on eliminating this protection. How do you feel about water quality regs, land use regs, heck, game regs? All them things are damn gummint tricks that, oh, by the way, help salmon.

There's plenty of stuff that the government has been behind, such as BPA and irrigation districts, for a couple of prime examples, that have had their share of impacts. But those don't happen just because the 'government' decided to do something. They happened because some interest group wanted the measure. And those interests are us. Not the Canadians, not the French, not the Democrats, not the martians. They were and are loggers, builders, farmers, paper mill workers, aluminum smelter workers, power company owners, and people who want to live next to a river but get offended when it floods.

Blaming the government, or the Democrats, or the Republicans makes you feel good. But it dodges the reality that we are where we are because we want everything. We want power. We want jobs. We want fish. And we don't want to pay more taxes that could fund hatcheries, fish ladders, and enforcement. Why? Because the government, everybody knows, is good for nothing and wastes every dollar we give them. Pah!

Back to the topic at hand, the current allocation process ain't perfect. But it also ain't what caused the issues in the first place. I think we sporties do fairly well in the allocation process. You're not going to eliminate commerical fishing, because the commercial fishing is what motivates the Magnusen act funding. The current process, as I previously discussed, is good in that it motivates each interest group to adopt better handling practices. If we don't like the share we get, well, talk to your legislators. I think the best indication that the current process is reasonable is that sporties and commericals hate it equally.

That's enough for one day. I wouldn't want your head to explode.