I saw what I thought are two flaws in Mark's article. First, since US v WA, why do we need a non-treaty fleet to supply salmon to the marketplace for that part of the public that doesn't go fishing for themselves? Seems like the treaty fleet is more than capable of supplying the market. Trying to preserve an anachronistic status quo just leaves all of us - commercial and recreational - on the non-treaty side fighting for a share. Which leads to flaw number 2, making the pie bigger so everyone gets all the fish that they want or need. Ain't never gonna' happen, no matter how big the pie is. The big pie train left the station long ago, never to return. I'm not saying that runs cannot increase or that the pie cannot be made larger. It just can't be made into the kind of large that would be necessary to satisfy everyone.

Maybe not since the beginning of time, but for most of recent history, people have been competing for scarce resources, be it good land, oil, or fish. And that's not going to change. The refusal to acknowledge that the time in history for a viable non-treaty gillnet fleet in WA state has come and gone just prolongs the pain of making the decisions that are consistent with this reality.

Sg