Smalma,

Thanks for the quick response...

The private world, just like the public, is not blessed with unlimited resources, including manpower, money, or time.

Battles have to be chosen based on several different factors, including immediate necessity, ability to affect the outcome, and costs/benefits of acting or not.

On the Columbia River gillnet-n-release issue, there are tens of thousands of wild steelhead to be affected, there is a blatant sell-off of sportsman driven recovery efforts for small commercial fishery gain, there is a total disregard for components of the ESU's steelhead runs, the economic emphasis is grossly overbalanced against the fishery at all, much less one with tripled impacts...and it can all be avoided by those who wish to benefit from the increased impacts.

It is a dangerous example to set that if the fishery is woefully inadequate at providing any fruitful economic returns and woefully inadequate at being prosecuted anywhere near acceptable impact levels, that rather than require that the netters (and their friends at Reg. 5 and the Director's Office) be proactive in creating a fishery that has less impact and more economic returns, that they pursue instead a lowering of the bar, a significant lowering of the bar, to re-define "success" as what they are already doing, rather than change what they are doing to achieve "success".

The equivalent would be sportfishermen wanting to harvest wild steelhead on the Skykomish, and rather than support recovery efforts, and when the fish are sufficiently recover, fish in appropriate times, places, and manners to have harvest and assure preponderance of the runs, they lobby instead to just lower the escapment goals by 60%.

If the escapement goals were lowered by 60%, all of a sudden the Skykomish recovery efforts are an overnight success...the river is over escapement, and we can fish with impunity.

This is by redefining success, rather than actually achieving it.

Perhaps it would be more appropriate if we were perpetually stuck in the year "1984"...which, thankfully, we are not.

Would you have supported such an action on the Snohomish system in 2002 if the sportsmen pushed for it? Would you have gone to bat for them to get it done?

I'm guessing not...but it's what the managers at Reg. 5 are asking NOAA-F to do, and next month they'll be asking the Commision to sign off on it, and fishermen and advocates are not going to take it sitting down, nor are they going to feel bad about doing it because there is a sport season on the Methow.

In my last post to you I was not asking the legal status of the Methow and LCR stocks...I was asking the biological status, the r/s ratios, the replacement levels. There are certainly fish with "legal status" who are doing well, and some (PS Steelhead, for example) with no legal status who are doing very, very poorly.

If your point has been to show disdain for effort in one area while other areas are going unaddressed (regardless of magnitude of the issues), then your point has been made.

What then do you think about the merits of the Columbia River Gillnet-n-Release fishery, its biological and economic impacts, and the reasons for and against tripling the allowable impacts?

Thanks, as usual, for your time...I appreciate your points and responses very much.

Fish on...

Todd

P.S. I do not view this as an allocation issue...arguments for and against who gets to kill the most or the last fish will all be hashed out, too...but in this case, there is no allocation issue.

There is no allocation issue because the entire increase in the impact will go directly to the commercial fleet...and the issue is how biologically sound that is (or is not).

If sportsmen were going to see some of that increase, and they and the netters were arguing over who gets what percentage of it, then that would be an allocation issue.

This is about should the increase even exist at all...which I believe, it should not.