I am reminded of something GI James said when asked about the paucity of wild fish given the massive Nooksack hatchery coho program. "Wild fish are nice but the people gotta eat." That sums it up. Like all of us, Tribal population grows. Even if the right to fish were restricted to ceremonial and subsistence an increasing population requires more fish.

As much as many folks want to see "sustainable" wild populations there is a large group that simply wants fish to eat. And some of those have (currently) a right to that.

Agreed, people gotta' eat. However, people don't need to eat taxpayer subsidized hatchery salmon, particularly when the economics of producing those salmon for harvest outside the State of Washington yields so little return to WA residents and taxpayers.

While people "gotta' eat," there is no intrinsic right to eat. Sometimes ya' gotta' get a job and buy lunch if you want to eat.

I am in full agreement with you about how the hatcheries are being funded. If WA believes hatcheries are necessary to support NI Commercials and Tribes then find them as line items under GF. Back before merger WDF was supported by GF; it was WDG/WDW that had license income to support themselves.

There are ample protein alternatives to salmon avaialble for the general public. Salmon shold only be an option for the table if you go and harvest it yourself, just like all other wild game animals.

And if, as in BC, the Tribal harvest is all for subsistence???

Agreed. But that will never happen. The industry is to big and those economies are engrained in coastal communities. If you look back in history the only way for them to end is total fishery collapse. A current example is the AK king and opilio multimillion $ commercial crab fisheries. We'll see how that industry holds up over the next few years. Collapse's are perfect opportunities to buy back commercial licenses and throw them in the trash!

I read an article before the AK crab closure that the baseline data being utilized for the crab populations was severely flawed. The writer put forth this had resulted in substantial overharvest for some years. Coupled with environmental conditions created the perfect storm for the crab.

There also were some warning signs in past years on the crab up there that were ignored. That would never happen down here.

How many other places including salmon/steelhead population predictions is the data flawed? Data is data if it follows general scientific principles as I learned in high school, and is typically accurate if left unbiased, unless manipulated to favor a certain interest.

Fun day on the water, for sure. Guess that means it was 11 years ago.

Crap.

I'm old now.