This has been another interesting discussion, is it habitat, harvest, or bad management, and is it worth the money to solve the problem. I think that it has been demonstrated that habitat is the limiting factor. What has been left out of the discussion is that the limiting area may not be freshwater and it is not ocean survival. The fact that both wild and hatchery escapements are low indicates that even though spawning habitats are trashed the major habitat problems are the estuary and nearshore areas in Skagit Bay and Saratoga Passage. In the discussion of the document that Smalma referenced it is indicated that juvenile chinook use these areas year around. Because of dikes, conversion of land to agriculture use, and urban development, the estuary of the Stillaguamish has been silted heavily and productivity greatly reduced. That may be the area where salmon recovery money should go first.

The issue of bycatch may be important but recreational fishermen can't complain too loudly. In the same document I mentioned above there is a graph of chinook escapement from 1974 to 2003 in the Stillaguamish system. What I find interesting is the pronounced even/odd year variation with odd years having significantly lower escapements than the even years over the last ten years of data. I speculate that this is related to the greatly increased popularity of the pink fishery in area 8. In the few times I fished for pinks in area 8 I saw several chinook hooked and released without consideration of good release techniques. The Pacific Salmon Commission estimated coastwide bycatch mortality of chinook in 2006 for commercial troll and recreational fisheries was 45,000 fish. None of these moralities are in the CWT data because the fish are not retained. I don't know if these numbers included Puget Sound recreational fisheries. I do know that there is an impact and relative to the number of fisherman I suspect that the winter blackmouth fishery is the worst in terms of bycatch. If recreational fishermen raise the issue of chinook bycatch I think the blackmouth fishery would be the first fishery to be closed.