The Swins have a small number of fishermen who net in the river, and they traditionally have not been real effective at intercepting sockeye. That may be why they are requesting more days. The Upper Skagits net around Hwy 9 and upstream. Their combination set net and drift net fishing is very effective on all species as far as I know. They could probably fish half as many days as Swinomish and still outfish them in total numbers.

The sad fact is that they fish the river for sockeye. It's totally unnecessary. All those sockeye will head to the Baker where they enter a fish ladder leading to new state of the art fish sorting facilities that can be used to measure how many fish are sent up to the spawning beaches, the hatchery, the lake, and totes for the tribes to come pick up with their sockeye. No ESA chinook bycatch this way. The only thing it can't do is process the fish for them. Of course it always comes back to who gets the fish and who gets the proceeds from selling them. That should be considered a fortunate dilemma.

Sg