Hi Sal,

I'm the CRC manager for WDFW, so I guess your rant is directed at me. I'll take a shot at answering your questions.

We get enough cards back to produce reasonably good estimates. We've been doing this long enough now (fifty years!) that we have a pretty good handle on the the non-response bias, and we spend a lot of time checking and reviewing the returns. We have had statisticians (real ones, I'm pretty sure) compare the estimates to those derived from more costly means, like creel and effort surveys, and found no significant difference. If you want more info on the whole estimation process, let me know - I can send you a description.

We actively discourage people from turning in their cards at the dealers. That just inserts another middleman, one who does not necessarily have any incentive to get the cards back to us in a timely fashion. So mail is the preferred method, until we can get online reporting up for fish, which hopefully won't take too much longer. From our experience with crab reporting, I think we will get about 80% of our reports in online.

There is no penalty for failure to return fish cards. So the money collected there is $0.

The cards are already pretty long. If we make the boxes bigger, either the card gets longer or we have fewer boxes. It's a compromise. The thermal paper that we use has gotten better over the years but it is still not perfect by a long shot. The vendors are the ones who demanded that all the licenses be printable on the same paper stock - that is why we have the grocery receipt-like licenses instead of the old pre-printed cards. The old cards were easier to write on, but the vendors really didn't like having to keep inventory of multiple documents.

So for now, keep on mailing in those cards. Things will get better when we have 1) online reporting and 2) an optional app to use in place of the physical card. Both of those are on the wish list, but sometimes the wheels turn slower than we all would like.

Thanks for your patience, and I hope you fill all the little boxes on your card this year.

- Eric