Easy enough...stop killing so many wild fish, stop flooding the spawning grounds with hatchery fish...that will solve about 20% of the problem.

Assume the dams will stay, which is a pretty good assumption to make...spill when the smolts need to go out, improve fish passage on all the dams to facilitate upstream migration, and protect the habitat in the spawning grounds that is still there.

That will give you the biggest bang for the buck than any techno-fix, by far, probably a factor of ten, if not 100.

Restore the spawning grounds that will help the most...and that includes restoring access to some grounds that are cutoff by smaller dams with poor or no fish passage on the tributaries.

Those helpers are some of the reasons why I dislike this idea of selective commercial fishing on the LCR so much...it doesn't address any of the factors that limit the productivity of the wild fish.

The same amount will (or more precisely, will not) spawn, the change in the amount of hatchery fish on the spawning grounds will be negligible, if that, and just to kick a ton of salt in the wound, it will further subsidize commercial fishing on the LCR and will make sportfishing even tougher.

As an added aside, we all agree that sportfishing generates much more money for our local economy, and this will just take many tens of thousands of dollars away from that and convert it into a handful of bucks for a handful of commercial fishers.

We all know what it will take to recover ESA salmon in the Columbia, we just lack the political will to do it. When I say "we", I mean everyone, not just fishermen...we as sporties have the political will, but we're a very small minority in the overall scheme of things.

I have no problem with going after the low hanging fruit, especially if it's just a start...I have no problem recognizing that eating the biggest apple starts with the smallest bite...unfortunately making the LCR commercial fishers go more selective is like attacking the apple by biting a tomato...the apple doesn't even get a mark on it.

NWP, and others...you've seen the numbers, you've seen how it pans out...no benefit to wild fish, reduced sportfishing opportunity, reduced sportfishing dollars...yet you keep on pushing. I can only imagine that it's because you really want to believe the fantasy that reality will shift when the CCA says it will...if it's something else, please enlighten me.

I don't care who has a good idea, and neither do the fish. I also don't care whose idea it is when it's a really bad idea...and neither do the fish.

If you really want the CCA to be a force to be reckoned with, then learn about the issues they're tackling before blindly accepting the party line, a party line developed by those who clearly don't know how the fish and fishing on the Lower Columbia River work.

Like I said in the "ocean selective" thread, I generally am in support of selective fisheries, but only when the selective fishery makes biological sense at least, and throwing in a little economic and social sense doesn't hurt, either.

Commercials going selective on the LCR won't satisfy any of those things, biological, economic, nor social...if someone could show me even the smallest iota of how it might, then we could at least have a conversation about it.

If someone would do as I suggest and say that we all realize this will do nothing whatsoever for spring Chinook, except for making sportfishing worse for them, but they're willing to make that sacrifice for the wild steelhead and sturgeon that are caught in the gillnets, then at least they'd be both honest and correct...and I might not even argue with them if that's what they said...hell, I'd probably even support it since I value the wild steelhead in the Columbia far more than I value a sportfishery for hatchery spring Chinook.

That being said, I think it gives all sportfishing and conservation advocates a kick right in the sack when an up and coming and very popular sportfishing/conservation organization either takes actions that are in direct opposition to what their membership thinks they are doing (saving spring Chinook and improving sporfishing for them), or know they are being deceptive on that count, but are selling it that way, anyway.

I'm afraid that the answer, from what I've seen, is that those who have chosen to support this just don't understand how the fish and fisheries on the LCR operate.

The entire reason the State is pushing this is to improve access to hatchery springers for the commercial fleet...it's the single, solitary reason...and not only that, they continually say so in their press releases and documents about it, yet the CCA and its followers continue to applaud the WDFW while ignoring everything that it says on the subject.

I also have no doubt that if this experiment becomes reality, and sportfishing on the LCR for springers goes further into the toilet, and no additional ESA springers show up on the spawning grounds, that the CCA will still gladly list it as a "WIN!" on their happy list...they've had a track record of doing that for a looonnnggg time in other states.

Fish on...

Todd