Originally Posted By: salmon bake
If the impact on wild winter steelhead was drastically reduced imagine the great returns we would see in just a few short years. So much money has been spent on habitat restoration on lower CR tribs. For these wild steelhead to recover. The only missing ingredient is spawning wild adults which get raped by gillnets. Without these nets hundreds of more steelies will spawn. Its that simple. With the shifts in hatcheries to wild broodstock, in which the hatchery runs come in march and early april ( clackamas gets lots of winter steel in april even into may) we would see much better returns without gillnets. Hatchery summer steelhead climbing willamette falls, supplying tens of thousands of fish to willamette valley steelheaders would see way more fish without gillnets. The lower columbia trib. Fish impacts will be near zero without gillnets and that's exiting news for die hard steelheaders that would rather not buy a 50,000 dollar sled for a three week season.


Perhaps the nets shouldn't fish the LCR before May 1st? They could easily fill their quotas in a short time period in the first 2 weeks of May.... Again, I'd love to see the nets gone but...... It won't happen.............

But that's not the debate at hand...

Keith help
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It's time to put the red rubber nose away, clown seasons over.