Reactionaries, a resource more abundant than Green River salmon.

Dolphin gets verbally beat up for being open minded enough to ask reasonable questions like, "are spawning escapement goals being met?" As Smalma posted above, the Green River consistently achieves spawning escapement goals with few exceptions. And that covers all species. Of course, most salmon and steelhead returning to the Green River are of hatchery origin, and we know that hatchery runs can support significantly higher harvests rates than can their natural production counterparts.

As sickening as the depicted scene is to some of you, those gillnetters are just doing their job, which is to harvest surplus salmon. And gillnets are a very efficient method of doing it.

If there is something to complain about, it comes down to harvest allocation and conservation of naturally reproducing stocks. As Smalma pointed out, the terminal area chinook are notoriously poor biters, so the only way to achieve a 50% non-treaty harvest would be to reinstitute the non-treaty gillnet fishery, which would accomplish the same thing as the treaty gillnet fishery, only it would happen a little further out in Puget Sound. The conservation issue that gnaws at my craw is that the Puget Sound Chinook Recovery Plan allows continued harvest rates for Green River chinook (along with Puyallup, Nisqually, and Skokomish) that will preclude forever the actual recovery of naturally self sustaining wild chinook populations.

It would be so unlike sport fishermen to look into a matter before leaping to erroneous conclusions. Some of you called the photo "raping the resource" and mention that it has been going on for years - why are salmon still returning? - without considering that the spawning escapement goals are being consistently met to sustain - mostly hatchery - production and sustain this kind of terminal area fishing.

BTW - regarding the comments about the Bristol Bay fishery, when the fleet is fishing there, the scene is about identical to this photo when it comes to gillnet density. This kind of fishery management comes down to having enough closed periods to attain the necessary escapement. Since Bristol Bay is managed for natural fish production, rather than hatchery, there are more and longer closed periods to allow escapement.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.