I have a ton of respect for Bill McMillan. He's a legendary steelheader and a devoted wild steelhead advocate, and I'd be honored to talk fish with him. That said, his opinions on what limits steelhead returns, informed and reasonable though they may be, are no more the last word than anyone else's.

There's a lot of talk about introgression, predation, and lot's of other things that get blamed on hatchery steelhead, and all of it's probably valid to some degree. If the argument is that hatchery steelhead don't help wild steelhead, I think it's clear that's the case. If the argument is that wild fish will make a marked recovery simply because hatchery fish are removed from the equation, what we have learned so far doesn't support that hypothesis.

Having had a little time to reason this all out, part of me has to appreciate two things about the outcome of the settlement:

1. Hatchery fish, while I maintain they are the only thing making steelhead fishing possible in the Puget Sound area, yield an extremely poor return on investment. From a strictly fiscal perspective, they have been a huge waste of money.

2. While there is a lot of evidence to suggest that hatchery fish are not a significant limiting factor in wild steelhead recovery, they seem to be a net detriment to that cause, and if that's true, removing them can only help.

I don't buy that hatchery steelhead "ringing the dinner bell" for predators is a legitimate argument. As Smalma will tell you, there are much larger numbers of other smolt species that share the same habitats, so the relatively small percentage of hatchery steelhead among them aren't likely to be a big contributor to that problem. If there are more predators consuming these fish than there were in the past, I would guess that's got a lot more to do with how we (humans) have over harvested those same species in the open ocean for over a century than hatchery smolt releases. Besides, if the hatchery smolt stop "ringing the bell," what shall we suppose will happen if larger numbers of wild smolts take their place? Seems like a no-win situation to me.

Whatever the outcome, we've got a change happening. All we can do now is hope it works for the better.