Families that have invested generations of time, money and blood in gillnetting will be justified in watching carefully and deserve a good deal of deference.


Why? That isn't what happened in 1935 when Int. 77 passed putting competitors of gill netters out of business in the Columbia R. by banning traps and all other types of nets.

A little history:

" Early in 1934 they formed the Salmon Conservation League. Described by its founders as “an expedient combination of both commercial and sports interests” (Washington Sportsman, 2, Feb.–Mar. 1936, p. 4), the league brought together the Washington State Sportsmen’s Council, which claimed to represent 120 sportsmen’s clubs with some 40,000 members (Washington Sportsman, 2, Apr.–May 1936, p. 15), the Purse Seine Fishermen’s Association, the Puget Sound Gill Netters’ Association, and the Trolling Vessel Owners’ Association. The commercial fishermen’ s associations provided the money, and the sportsmen’ s groups supplied the manpower (Washington Sportsman, 2, Feb.–Mar. 1936, p. 4).

On February 1, 1934, the Salmon Conservation League filed Initiative Measure No. 77 with the Secretary of State and began to circulate petitions to collect the voter signatures required to place it on the November ballot under the guise of conservation but the gillnetters also despised the operators of the fish wheels farther upriver. It galled them to witness fish being dumped rhythmically into huge piles without so much as an erg of human effort being exerted. The wheels, with their enormously visible productivity, seemed capable of destroying the salmon runs and with them the livelihood of the gillnetters. The lower river men were reluctant to recognize publicly that the gillnets, being so numerous, captured many times more salmon than the small number of productive wheels".
History also shows that the commercial partners in the coalition in 1937 started back stabbing their partners the sportsmen by changing boundaries and rules to name afew.

I can't speak for the other sportsmen, but gillnetters are not going to get any support or sympathy from me due to history.