Smalma,

While I appreciate your posts and your insights on most every topic you choose to participate in, this one is not one of them.

Without directly addressing your last post head on, I'll do it via questions:

1. What is the stock status of the Methow River fish compared to the weakest stocks of the LCR listed fish?

2. Compare/contrast the expected encounter and mortality rates of a Methow River sport fishery and a LCR gillnet fishery (encounters and mortality rates on listed fish).

3. What is the allowable ESA impact on the listed fish in each fishery, and how are each fisheries doing relative to that impact?

4. What would happen to a Methow River sport fishery if it either:
a. Encountered many more times the amount of listed fish as was previously expected, and
b. had a mortality rate as high as the LCR gillnet fishery?

5. Related to number 4, in order of likelihood, which actions would managers take if the Methow River fishery enounted, say, 700% of the expected encounter rate, and had a nearly 50% mortality rate?
a. nothing and allow it to go on
b. close the fishery
c. search for some sort of fishery that would dramatically lower either the encounter rate or mortality rate
d. ask NOAA to triple the allowable impacts so that the fishery could go on as is.

Before you put in your answers, I'll give them a general shot without the benefit of having the numbers in front of me.

Both runs of fish are listed. The Methow fish are doing fairly well, existing above replacement level consistently. The Methow River fishery is being prosecuted over a sinble run of fish.

The LCR net fishery is being prosecuted over dozens of individual runs of fish, some of which are in dire straits.

The Toutle River stock, among others, in the LCR are barely at replacement level, and any increase in impacts is likely to result in their extinction (per WDFW and ODFW biologists).

The encounter rate for the Methow is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/100 or 1/1000 of that of the LCR gillnet fishery.

The mortality rate for fish encountered on the Methow is probably around 2% (barbless single hooks, no bait, cold water)...the mortality rate for the "gillnet and release" fish is, what?, around 50%?

If the Methow fishery could somehow magnify its impacts a hundredfold, or a thousandfold, it would be closed. Period.

The actions that regulators would take, in order of likelihood, would be as follows:

1. Close it (100% chance)
2. Modify it (0% chance)
3. Seek to change allowable impacts, lower the bar as it were, to make the fishery all of a sudden "successful" (0% chance)
4. Do nothing (0% chance)

So, we have a sport fishery that has a measurable, but extremely low, encounter and mortality rate, that would be closed at the drop of a hat if there was any hint of overfishing...this on a run that is existing well over replacement level.

Next, we have a "gillnet and release" fishery that has an encounter rate that is astronomical...nearly 70% of the catch is non-target, ESA listed fish, and the mortality rate is through the roof.

Components of the LCR ESU are existing right around replacement level (a bit above, at, or a bit below), and both states' bios have stated that some of those components will go extinct if the impacts are increased.

The mangers' response when faced with this scenario?

They ask to raise the allowable impacts 300% so that they can legally kill many more ESA listed steelhead and spring chinook while harvesting hatchery chinook.

This argument, while compelling enough as it is, doesn't even bring in the economics of the situation, which is so astronomically in favor of NOT having that net fishery at all, much less with the triple impacts.

Attempting to characterize outrage at this situation as being hypocritical is not only trying to draw comparisons between apples and oranges, it's drawing comparisons between grains of dust and the plantet Jupiter.

Am I that far off base here?

Fish on...

Todd