For the first time ever I have to chime in. I stayed away from the great chum debates of '09 along with the pink stories but this one has got me going for some time not not just here.
I think that everyone is trying to blame one thing or another for the decline of our fish runs, especially steelhead, but never as a collective threat to our fish. Yes the tribes and the state are morons for continuing down this path of destruction. The hand writing is on the wall in big letters and we turn the apathetic eye, and blame the ocean, or it was the loggers, or its all the tribes fault. Everybody is right, and if we stick to just one problem everybody is wrong. As for habitat loss, we need to give these fish more credit than we do, the toutle was brought up and that is a great example of the resilience of these fish. They were written off after the explosion and now there back (talk about a clear cut). Harvest to me will always be the big problem. Its not just us its not just the tribes here in washington. Just like our salmon all of these fish migrate up past alaska as part of their life cycle. So we look for problems at the terminal areas as the reason these fish are not comming back. To an extent it is these fish run the gauntlet of nets in the open ocean from Japan to California , although south not as much as it use to be. You dont need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that around the time they started to figure our runs were starting to decline is about the same time that the alaskan commerical fisheries really started to boom. Targeted or not they still end up in nets, we all know that nets don't care what get caught in them.
So moral to the story, we reward our fish that surrived terrible river conditions and that just ran the thousands of miles of nets strung around the ocean with even more nets and a catch and kill fishery in the home streach that takes half of the survivors WTF great plan guys. So if your confused as to why less fish are at the redds in oregon look north its the same everywhere. Just because you dont have a commerical fishery doesnt mean that nobody else does.