Aunty I agree with you on most parts of your post, but seems to me some of these other folks are a little naďve as to how any banning of a gear type will actually do anything:

1. The tribes get to kill 12% of the wild spring Chinook run, and they will always use gill nets (or at least they will always kill 12% of the wild fish even if they go selective). We screwed up the habitat and overfished the runs forever….so why should they ever reduce their 12%, regardless of the selective nature. That just means they get to take more hatchery fish then.

2. Nontribal gets to kill 2% (not counting the dams as nontribal, cause they get something above 60%, but of course that’s not a problem worth mentioning) and from this 2%, it is split this last year of 1.2% to recreational and 0.8% to commercial (regardless of the selective nature of the gear type).

3. Getting rid of gill nets does not save wild fish if you simply roll their current 0.8% ESA kill back into the total allowable exploitation. The same amount of wild fish die no matter how selective a gear type is.

Now as this is an Oregon initiative, what makes you think WA will follow suit? I know what most folk’s response is to why we need to use the 0.8% commercial ESA impact rolled in the recreational sector, to get those hatchery fish off the spawning grounds, right. That’s part of the double edged sword of selective fisheries; you get to keep more hatchery fish while killing the same amount of wild fish. But in no way do you SAVE any wild fish in the process….to only real savings is in keeping excess hatchery fish from spawning.

Well WDFW is already trying to test selective commercial gear, having BPA fund the test, and as recently reported from the Columbia Basin Fish & Wildlife News Bulletin (Link here for full story: CBB )
“WDFW officials envision a future in which the river's commercial fishers could catch considerably more fish than they do now while helping boost wild fish productivity. The use of gear that causes little mortality would allow the harvest of more hatchery fish within the ESA impact limits and help control the number of hatchery fish that inevitably stray onto spawning grounds. Too much mixing of hatchery and wild fish is believed to reduce the fitness of the naturally produced stocks.”

To top it all off the WA commission recently passed a hatchery reform policy that gives priority to gear types based on their selectivity. So if the commercial guys develop a gear type that is more selective than recreational gear, they won’t be limited to the measly 0.8% ESA impact limit. If non-treaty ESA share stays at 2% and the commercials are more selective….where are they going to get impacts from, especially now that they can catch more hatchery fish? I’ll tell you where….the sport fishery. Rather than propositioning the commercial sector to become selective, WA should have just removed freshwater commercial fishing from the river. Banning a gear type forces these guys elsewhere and these types of scenarios are playing out in front our your eyes that will result in poorer and poorer recreational fisheries. JMO…