Quote:
Originally posted by Curtis H.:
Part of the problem with north end hatchery returns are the fact that they use those mixed stock, chambers creek fish. I believe if they killed off all those genetically week brats we have these days and started using a new line of fish. Use native brood stock from the system and you will get fish that survive much better, grow much bigger, and are way more aggressive.
They tried using native brood stock on the Skagit and the return was less then the number of fish they used for that brood stock. Resulting in less fish returning then if they would have allowed the captured brood stock to spawn naturally.

The Skagit steelhead hatchery program has been a dismal failure from the very beginning.

Interestingly, some have shown that the collapse of the wild steelhead runs on the Skagit runs parallel to the expansion of the hatchery steelhead program on the Skagit. As the hatchery program was expanded with increasingly larger releases the retuning wild steelhead numbers dropped dramatically.