That truly is the crux of selective fishing...... extracting the maximum amount of hatchery fish over the greatest duration of time given the constraints of wild impact.

BUT.....

Where wild fish are present in harvestable numbers, and there are other depressed/threatened/imperiled stocks mixed into the same fishery, susceptible to the same gear type, it makes more sense to bonk the harvestable wilds as quickly as possible, reducing time on the water for the fleet, and in turn reducing impacts on those other vulnerable mixed stocks.

That's exactly the tact we took for Grays Harbor this year.

I sincerely hope any of you thinking about participating in the fishery seriously keeps that concept in mind. We sold our season to WDFW at the NOF meetings as a chinook conservation plan. We need sports to honor that by quickly catching their limits of coho and exiting the fishery ASAP to minimize chinook encounters. If we can't demonstrate the required discipline to do so THIS YEAR, kiss this type of unique opportunity good-bye in the future.