Originally Posted By: Bill on the bay
Will a gillnetter be able to sucsessfully convert and be efficient at using a seine net?

IMO...No.

You are correct, Billbay Baggins, when you say gillnets are indiscriminate killers of virtually all species of fish, birds, and mammals they come in contact with while seiners do have the ability to be more selective in what they harvest. But I don't see any possible way that a gillnet boat can be converted to a seine boat....you couldn't fit 10% of a typical seine net aboard a gillnetter. When you switch to seine nets you're essentially switching the entire fleet of commercial fishing boats....gillnet boats head to the docks and the seiners come out.

To my knowledge there is only one tribal purse seiner in the entire commercial fleet...the Admiral. So treaty fishermen would need new boats as well as new nets. Non-treaty seine boats would more than likely need to construct brand new nets (~$50,000) to fish the CR...the "fall nets" they use for Puget Sound chums are too immense, both too long and too deep. They might be able to use their "SE nets" they use in Alaska but I can't say for sure.

Even if all the harvest was done with seiners I'm not sure how feasibile it is to selectively harvest the clipped fish. Here's the scenario....the seine boat purses up the whole seine and now you have, say, 250 fish (4,000 pounds is a decent set) in the net along side the boat.....150 clipped Springers, 50 ESA Springers, and 50 wild steelhead.

How do you get the steelhead and wild (or as Keith says, and I agree, the unclipped hatchery) springers out of the big net and release them unharmed? If you hoist them out of the water and dump them on the deck they are, for the most part, dead. The only way I can see it could be done is to take hand nets and circle around the purse seine in the skiff and hand dip all the ESA fish out. Right! That would be more than a little time consuming, if it's even possible. Commercial fisherman don't give a rat's ass about ESA fish, they're out there fishing for the money. If it takes them 2 hours each set to sort through 250 fish by hand to remove the 100 ESA fish, I just don't think it would be worth it for them.

Using seine nets sounds good in theory, I'm just not sure how feasible, both logistically and economically, it really is.

Ike