This is one that I just can't resist. Don't have much to contribute in regards to netting when it comes to steelheads and salmon, but I have an opinion based on a different experience.

My Dad has guided sportfisherman for the last 30 years down in the salt water estuaries of Louisiana for redfish and speckled trout. When "blackened" redfish were all the rage, the netters hopped on the program like vikings on a rape and pillage mission. In short order, they all but wiped out the redfish, and smoked the speckled trout population with their "rags".

There weren't any Indians netting any fish in this situation. Things got ugly down there when the sporties went toe to toe with the netters, and a few on both sides mysteriously showed up as fish food in the marsh. Not the way to handle it, but it all ends up in a happy story.

Amazingly enough, after the ban on gill nets went in to effect, our redfish and trout mysteriously showed up again in force. We have some of the best redfish and speckled trout fishing in the past 50 years. This is not a coincidence.

It's no different than the way the Indians netted out Upper Red Lake in Minnesota for walleyes. This place was a walleye factory, and is now a dead sea. The state came up with a neat plan to increase our liscense costs to re-stock a lake that we could never fish, because it was a tribal lake only. Is there something wrong with this picture.

Hard to release a dead fish. Show me a catch and release net, or one that can discriminate species of fish.

It's not the field of dreams, but "IF YOU TAKE OUT THE NETS, THEY WILL COME.


Tight lines and keep the fire burning.