thanks for the reply doug. to clear things up a bit, if escapement goals were set at a level that provides extra protection for wild runs (excessive floods, landslides, bad ocean conditions, etc.) i wouldn't have a problem with a limited harvest on wild fish... but a very cautious fishery (my position is the same for wild salmon). of course, i don't believe that we have run sizes at this level right now almost anywhere in this state to have heavy harvests like those proposed by the state for the north coast rivers, especially on the hoh, which i believe has been closed early (by emergency) 3 of the last 4 years. to me, reopening the hoh to unlimited kill is not responsible, but i hope you check into the figures for yourself and make up your own mind on this.

another question one must ask on this issue is how accurate are spawning counts done by WDFW. i believe that they consistently over estimate numbers. they use index counts where the index may not be representative of the entire river...ie picking a real productive stretch and trying to use that to cover the rest of the river, including unproductive areas. there are errors in counting redds. many fish start and then stop redd building, but it looks like two redds, although only one has eggs in it. also, lamprey redds can often be mistaken for steelhead redds by those without a lot of experience counting redds. so there may in fact be a large error when they tell us what the average escapement has been on the quillayute over the last five years is 12,181 fish (escapement is 5,900).

of course, 12,000 fish sounds like a lot of fish, and if correct it's great news. but remember those fish are divided between the sol duc, bogie, calawah, and dickey... now it doesn't sound like such a huge number.

hopefully, we can let the department know how we feel these rivers should be managed in the future. imo, it's all whether we stay the course with the existing regs, or whether we want to move backwards and let the state "manage" these fish stocks like all the others.... into the toilet. maybe a bit simplistic, but it's how i feel about it.

let's let them know we want to at least keep these existing regulations... at least for a few more years until we get to see the hopeful increase in wild fish numbers from these existing regs.

on another note, the existing and new proposed regs have nothing in them to protect a run of wild steelhead that is in bad shape in all these rivers... and that's the early-timed winter steelhead that once made up a large percentage of the total run, but has been knocked down considerably. seems to me, when there's hatchery fish in the rivers, there's no need to kill wild fish. just another thought.

chris