And yet in my own home basin, we continue to fail meeting a paltry fall chinook escapement goal. Managers missed the spawner goal 6 out of the most recent 8 returns on record. Ensuring the creature's ability to sustainably and abundantly procreate should be the priority.

Structuring a fishery that makes that happen consistently would be nice. Building in incentives for conservation and stewardship would be even nicer. At present, the Grays Harbor Policy lays out the harvest restraint necessary at the local level to help achieve spawner goals more consistently. We can't even begin to think about targeting them unless e-goals have been met at least 3 of the previous 5 returns. The problem is that pre-terminal exploitation has already taken 40% of the year's adult production before a single king swims over the bar at Westport.

Terminal harvest is simply a much better fit given the life history of the critter we want to conserve.
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Management would be much easier and effective if salmon fisheries were prosecuted strictly in terminal areas in/near the basin of origin. This paradigm would also confer the greatest accountability for local stakeholders and policy-makers to determine whether or not their local fish stocks prosper or perish. Local stakeholders reap EXACTLY what they sow.

It would effectively create a unified point source of collective local harvest, eliminating the guesswork in how many fish disappear into some unaccountable black hole in distant often unknown fisheries.

Eliminating distant open ocean harvest would be a boon to the recovery of older age classes of salmon that have been wiped out in most of the major salmon-producing arteries of the PNW. Larger older fish simply don't stand a chance in the present day harvest milieu. Our artificially induced selection pressures weigh heavily against a life strategy with prolonged oceanic foraging. 4-, 5- and 6-salt life histories of the past are EXTREMELY difficult to genetically perpetuate because the odds are too great that a fish spending that amount of time in the killing fields would simply NEVER survive to spawn to pass on that genetic trait. It's no surprise that these fish are such a modern-day RARITY!

I believe this is a key element to securing sustainable salmon populations that managers conveniently ignore or simply refuse to touch. There is just too much geo-socio-political "status quo" inertia to overcome. How do you dismantle a fully capitalized macro-economy fueled by the open ocean harvest of free-swimming wealth?

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And for the record I'm not accusing anyone of personal actions that are illegal or unsporting or inherently bad. Folks are either fishing to put food on their table or to earn an honest living, exploiting the resource entirely within the law. The problem is having all that exploitation occurring in a framework with no accountability to getting fish back to their rivers of origin where they can procreate. In the end, it's not about managing fish, it's about managing people.... specifically the people killing the fish. The ultimate management goal is to put sufficient constraints on the killing to make sure there is adequate escapement to the basin of origin.

When the killing is going on across points far and wide with zero ability for local managers to control where, when, and who is killing their fish, it makes their job of putting enough fish on the gravel virtually impossible. Terminal harvest (salt and fresh) in fishing zones within or immediately adjacent to the basin of origin greatly simplifies the accounting for the harvest of fish destined for that basin.

Get real, folks.

If you found out the Russians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese, Taiwanese or whatever-eze were snarfing up 40, 50, or 60% of the take (either thru target fisheries or as by-catch) before the fish ever reached home waters, you'd ALL be screaming bloody murder.

What we have now is a giant chaotic free-for-all with no way to know how the chips are going to fall until it's too late. Bottom line, we need to re-structure and embrace a new harvest paradigm to be better stewards of the resource.

The sooner the better.