Quote:
Originally posted by Salmo g.:
Gillnets let most of the steelhead through safely, but they have a high interception rate and mortality rate on wild spring chinook, which are also ESA listed. Tangle nets don’t kill so many wild chinook, which is a priority so that they can fish for more of the hatchery chinook. However, 4 ½" tangle nets catch many more steelhead than 9" mesh gillnets.

So they “need” to increase the allowable impact on ESA steelhead in order to fish for more hatchery chinook.


IMO, this is a stupid fishery. It is biologically unsupportable. It isn’t supported economically, either. Socially, it preserves a small piece of the dying non-treaty gillnetting “tradition,” at the expense of the broader based social benefit of many citizens enjoying fishing for spring salmon with lower mortality rates to wild ESA salmon, and almost no impact to ESA steelhead. If someone can explain an intelligent rationale for this fishery, I would so love to hear it. This fishery makes less sense to me than commercial buffalo hunting, which doesn’t harm other ESA species.
Brilliantly said, Salmo.

If managers and commies had any brains, they would gladly implement some other form of selective harvest to

1) maximize profits from the resource, and
2) minimize management headaches

while having negligible impact on ESA "protected" stocks.

When will they realize that their $eason$ on hatchery $pring chinook can be maximized when their method$ allow the unharmed LIVE relea$e of ESA protected $tock$?

How about bringing back the fishwheels of days gone by?
_________________________
"Let every angler who loves to fish think what it would mean to him to find the fish were gone." (Zane Grey)

"If you don't kill them, they will spawn." (Carcassman)


The Keen Eye MD
Long Live the Kings!