WDR

I too have had days like this on the Skokomish. I am quite familiar with the hole you were fishing at, as well as a few more downstream. The snaggers come in at low tide when this tidal portion of the river is at its skinniest and the fish pack in.

However, sport has nothing to do with Tribal Fishing; upstream of the bridge (between the upper and lower bridges) the tribes use nets. Downstream of the lower bridge, nets are restricted, but they can snag anywhere on the Res. The Tribe is excercising their Treaty fishing rights, and I would hope they are utilizing what they catch, even if it is only to sell the roe. A lot of folks on this board think its such a waste to catch bucks and hens, only to keep the roe and not the meat, but commercials do this as well, only not in the publics eye.

Your notions of conservation are also not relevent in this circumstance. These fish are 100 percent hatchery fish. If no one fished them, why raise and let em go. And I guarantee, the Skokomish River has only a fraction of the native spawning water it used to have. This is the river that makes the news every November because it floods most years. The river has been filled in because of surrounding agro, logging, and the Lk Cushman dam.

I know that it goes against all the sensibilities of sporties to watch fish get snagged or netted, but by in large, the fight is one of allocation, not conservation (with some notable exceptions). If we stopped fishing for 5 years, the increased numbers of fish would be native, not hatchery, and I for one don't keep native fish.

Even if native runs were built up to the point where they can be safely sport caught, look at what they're doing in Alaska now. Even with the very small human population and virtually no development to muck up the streams, they have instituted severe catch restrictions in their sport fisheries. This is because they are having problems making their escapments since most of their runs are not supplemented by hatchery fish.

Down here, with streams only producing a portion of what they historically produced, and with our large population, native catch and kill fisheries are bound to last only a few years before there are depletion issues; they just don't make all that much sense.

People confuse allocation and conservation issues when talking about Tribal fisheries all of the time, but we should be talking conservation only in specific cicumstances, such as upper Columbia River salmon, Olympic peninsula steelhead, north Puget Sound steelhead, and a few others. Indian nets damage the hell out of sport fisheries, but not necessarily out of the resource as a whole.