Yelloweye, I have to ask were you at any of the meetings. If you were did you listen to the back and forth justification form a former employee of the State and how 1st the Chinook Run for the Chehalis is so healthy and strong that we need to target those 544 Chinook in the bay. It is unacceptable to do anything else. Then the next meeting he went on to say that an additional 2 weeks in the fresh water for Coho was not on the side of conservaation??? My rebuttal was to pull the numbers from 2006, as Todd mentioned, and prove that in a 2 week fishery directed at Chinook Harvest, we managed to take 1156 fish. Just a little more then the 450 we where given to harvest. So when you strongly feel that we should be going after the 544 fish we have this year, you really are not looking at the big picture. Yes the Tribes will take Chinook and No there is not anything we can do about it. If they harvest Coho this season and have a by-catch of 13% as they did last year on a non-Chinook-retention year, then they will potentially take 2 to 3,000 Chinook, out of the system. If the Quinaults fish the Chehalis Bound Chinook to say, 2,000 fish under escapement, on another year with a Pre-Season exceeding escapement, they will force the hand of seeing our Chehalis Basin Chinook Listed. That would create problems for them that we aren’t going to try to understand. And when you say the guys in the bay don't get a directed Chinook Fishery so the guys in the upper rivers can have theirs, that makes no sense. This is a non-Chinook retention for sport. If they change any element of the plan, and give the commercial guys 1 day in area 2-A, our committee will be very disappointed because it deviates from Tier 1. As far as the State and the Tribes, I wish Phil Anderson and the rest good luck in negotiating a harvest Plan with the Quinaults and hope they can convince them to Harvest with an Impact Cap. That would be best for all involved, but truly it is out of our hands.

FireFish