At the hearings, the commercials demand 50% of the harvest, or 50% of the ESA impacts. To them that's 'equitable'. And total equity with sports, if not better, has been their goal.

To sports, giving that much to 200 commercials is an outrage.

The commercials haven't gotten their goal, and that's what the fightings been about - the same fight that spawned CCA.

When the commercials can fish with 1% mortality and anglers are at 10% you can bet that SalmonforAll will be at the front of the room demanding a larger share in return for fishing selectively -- as opposed to those filthy, greedy anglers that kill 10%.

Since the below Bonneville catch of upriver fish is firmly linked to and capped by catch-balancing with the Tribes, there will not be any overall increase of the TOTAL kept. We will only be fighting about who catches them - us or them - the allocation battle goes on, and the commercials will have a new compelling argument.

On Spring Chinook, with catch-balancing locked into place, if you want more upriver hatchery fish removed, it's better economics to accomplish this through full sport seasons and increased bag limits. Not giving the commercials an even stronger prescence on the Columbia.

Both the ocean commercial fisheries and the Tribes increasingly selling commercially have developed since the time when the gillnetters ruled. Let the trollers and Tribes now supply the market (that also kicks the legs out from under the fearful argument that without netters there's no hatcheries, complete BS).

We don't need commercial fishing in the lower Columbia, period.

And that ought to be the real question - why commercial fishing at all?

That is the approach CCA takes in other fishery battles, according to TIDE magazine.

Not spending public money to create a kinder, gentler, more entrenched, more dominant commerical fishery.