Reducing the 15% incidental take of wild ESA springers isn't essential for recovery. If it was, then legally NMFS couldn't have allowed it after the listings. !5% is a low exploitation rate for any but the most severely depressed chinook population. That might have been where some of the stocks were, but significant numbers of wild chinook make up part of each season's run. A lot of those wild fish may be the result of hatchery fish spawning in the natural environment, but once they succeed, both the law and management count them as wild. So long as increasing numbers of chinook are reproducing naturally, by definition, recovery is happening. BTW, much higher harvest rates are permitted on some listed Puget Sound chinook populations.

I'm OK with chipping away at the LCR commercial fleet anyway possible, but it's been obvious to me for several years that it really comes down to an allocation issue and making the highest and best use of a scarce resource. (No matter if the springer run hits one million, it will still be a scarce resource.) Society does itself a disservice allocating a large share of a scarce resource to subsidize a few antiquated gillnetters on the LCR when there are thousands of recreational anglers who would use many days of recreation and spend millions of dollars to harvest what the gillnet fleet (or alternative selective fishery fleet) does in a few nights or days. It ain't pretty, and the greedy sportsmen card will be extensively over-played, but in the end society needs to face up to the illogic of allocating such a valuable public resource to such a small, entirely subsidized, private interest group. BAN the nets. It only makes sense, today, tomorrow, for all the future.

Sg