FF did not say sport fishers but hook and line which include trollers. All hook and line fisheries utilize the fishes own instincts to catch them. Also it is the hook and line that are trashing the 5 & 6 year fish as they are there two more years in the sea to get banged on. This is not a secret FF just something we do not like to admit. The greatest damage done by BC & AK.

Terminal fishing is a strange thing as to harvest as unlike commercial efforts which is mostly about finding them as catching is not that difficult. Weather. water, run timing just about everything is a variable. Certain things are a given in GH such as Chinook high % South channel and Coho North channel, that Coho & Chinook will stage up someplace in tidewater ( remember tidewater goes to past Fuller Hill ) or near that and find that area you catch fish. So you can have what looks like a huge amount of fish which can be that or about 10 other things.

Historically the best terminal Rec fishing has been years when Coho are up and Chinook & Chum are down followed by years when Chinook are down as it limits commercial tribal and NT efforts. Even low Coho runs can be great inriver as limited commercial time due to run size. The historical view is a bit off now as the GHMP did away with 7 days a week netting so inland it is different than in the past.

If you back up a bit farther back in time to the days where tons of small boats trolled all over from South Monte down the fundamental difference is hatchery production. We are down about 2 million smolt on Coho ( not counting the Hump ) which is about 60K of adults as the old rule is about 3% to the bar on Chehalis origin Coho. So these fish staged up so you simply had a lot of fish in the pool and 40 to 60k of Coho makes a real difference. Also as always in GH the limiter was natural production so the co managers could not do a wipe out thing. Our natural production has been stable but the dramatic reduction for hatchery production is the difference in Rec harvest in the last 10 years.

The dishonesty of WDF&W on all this is simply amazing and most do not even know what the hell happened. From the absolute stealing of the Skook hatchery for PS tribal production to budget driven production reductions that were more a swipe at the QIN than dollars it is a rather ugly bit of history that simply could not have happened anyplace else in the state.