Some interesting ideas here!

Clearly terminal fisheries make the most biological sense but sure that many here would be willing to pay the price to convert entirely to such a system.

For most fisheries if the goal is to have the fisheries in terminal areas (and in river are the logical place to have such fisheries) it will take a huge change in how the non-treaty fisheries are conducted to achieve a more or less equal sharing between the treaty and non-treaty fisheries. That sharing seems to be a high priority for most here on this site. To achieve such a sharing will require that the focus of the non-treaty fisheries be in some form of commercial fishing. In terminal areas hook and line fisheries (especially in heavily exploited fisheries) is just to darn inefficient to harvest anything close to the non-treaty share.

Outside of the possible cases of steelhead and spring Chinook the recreational fleet is probably incapable of exerting high exploitation rates. To my knowledge Baker Lake sockeye recreational fishery is one of the most successful terminal fishery I know of. Even there it seems that the cap on harvest levels is around 60%. One needs only to look at the recent Baker Lake thread and the desire to change things to see how that is working out. Most of the other in-river recreational fisheries can not come close to those Baker lake levels.

Curt