What gets me is that these SOB's at WDFW have seen this $hiat coming for the past 20 years and have done squat to curtail the precipitous decline in wild fish populations.

What makes you think the same unresponsive bureaucracies can come up with some master plan today that they've had 20 years to work on without delivering. Odds are long that the same agencies have the balls to effect any meaningful change.

Twenty years? What am I thinking? It's actually been more like 120 years of doing the same old same old... repeating the mistakes of the past... lip-service and band-aid fixes for gaping wounds... tinkering at the edges without getting to the root of the problem.

HABITAT HABITAT HABITAT!

Lichatowich siad i best. Can't have healthy runs of salmon/steelhead without healthy rivers!

HARVEST HARVEST HARVEST

And while current PS harvest of wild steelhead is an inconsequential pittance of what it once was, the mindset of harvesting all the way down to ridiculously small escapement goals is something that needs to be eradicated from WDFW policy.

Suppose habitat could be restored to practical and reasonable levels with measurable increases in wild steelhead returns. Would we really want to go right back to harvesting the restored populations right back down to MSY? What's the frickin' point?