Wild Chrome, I hate to be disagreeable, but I really don't agree with you at all re farmed fish. They are hardly capable of sustaining themselves in the wild, certainly less so that conventional hatchery fish which can hardly spawn at all. And there is no documented record of atlantic salmon successfully establishing a population anywhere on the west coast - the fish you see spawning in rivers are all escapees, but none of their eggs ever survive - local diseases that wild fish have long adapted to are instant death to them. Farm stocks are frail, subject to lots of diseases that native fish have long since developed immunity to, but there is no record of net pen fish infecting anything, in fact the disease sampling protocols for farmed fish producers are very strict. And the annual effluent from all the net pens in the state is just a fraction of the nutrient load coming from Seattle Metro, let alone all the hundreds of thousands of failing septic systems in floodplains and along shorelines.

The positive thing about the net pen industry is that they can undersell the commercials and will eventually put them out of business. I personally detest commercial fishermen - they are souless parasites that would gladly harvest the last fish if we let them, they sell salmon and steelhead for less than it costs the state to raise them in a hatchery, they strip eggs and throw away the carcasses, they do not fish selectively, they routinely "bycatch" fish that they are not supposed to target, they willingly shovel 100 pounds of dead juvenile and bait fish over the side for every pound of shrimp they trawl, they are the willing tools of overharvest and habitat destruction in the worlds oceans, and they have absolutely no business fishing for any fish that a sport fishermen wants to fish for, simply because that sport-caught fish is worth 15 times more to the economy than what their commercial caught fish is. How many hatcheries could we fund with just the taxes collected on the difference in value? Yet here we are, allowing commercial fishing on the Columbia, which is keeping the sport catch down, keeping sport fishermen home, and keeping the econimic return at 1/15th of where it should be, while we are suffering a state budget deficit and closing hatcheries. Why commercial fishing for salmon is allowed at all is way beyond me - makes no sense economically, politically, or even biologically - let the surplus fish head upstream and die like they are supposed to so that our rivers can actually grow fish again.

I never buy fish. I give fish to all my relatives that don't fish so that they never have to buy fish. I release wild fish and target hatchery fish. Why a sport fisherman would buy a commercially caught fish is so far beyond me that I think someone who does has got to be from a different planet. Well, I apologize, but dammit, just the thought of a commercial fishing supporter in our ranks pees me off

W.C... F.Y.I A wild fish IS a reintroduced steelhead "hatchery." I respect your thoughts, but I can't say I would agree. When have we as humans ever stopped before it was too late? If there is another way we never take the path. Pen raised fish is the new wave to protect our resources. Tell me you wouldn't enjoy having a higher % of return. Just a thought but what if the goverment was to instatute an loan to commercial fishermen, to create their own net pens. I would be happier. Think about the other posts here, these guys couldn't be more right. J.C.B

JCB,

What do you mean by reintroduced hatchery?

The last several posts raise interesting points and I'm not so proud as to defend all my points against them as I am not an expert, but I'm still skeptical that it's clear-cut better to buy farmed fish. None of you addressed my 5th point about the value to the public in having a commercial fishery to justify habitat protection. If the gen. public doesn't care about fish abundance, will the developers loggers, ect. eliminate the remaining habitat? With commercial fishing eliminated, will sportfishing receive more heat from environmentalists? Will we lose our right to fish? I think this is a very gray issue.

A representative named Doumit from Cathlamet is a staunch supporter of commercial fishermen, and is leading the charge in our state legislature to gut the shoreline act and end the meager habitat protection that WDFW is able to enforce through the Hydraulic Code by gutting it too, because he like most of our "representatives" are staunchly supported by developers. Nuff said

I'm confused,

Doumit is staunchly supported by developers and commercial fishermen? Seems like on the most important and expensive fish issue (habitat loss) those two groups would be on opposite ends of the spectrum. If Doucit is trying to gut habitat protections, why do the commercial fishermen support him?

Likely because commercial fishermen don't care about habitat - if they did they wouldn't be dragging trawls through sensitive ocean habitats, such as cold water coral beds, that take millenia to develop and are destroyed in just a few passes. I don't have the URL but there is a very good article about this on the net. As with all people there are individual exceptions, but in general commercial fishermen are not our allies. Prime example in the Columbia - the Corps wants to restore the WW2 vintage boat basin that was dredged in the intertidal area adjacent to Lois Island (actually the tide flats are now the island), using dredge spoils, to create more intertidal habitat for juvenile salmon and to get rid of dredged material without disposing of it in productive fish habitat. They are being mortally opposed by - you guessed it - commercial gillnetters, because this deep water is easy to fish in. These people are not our freinds - please don't buy thier fish.

W.C, What I mean is the wild fish you refer to are reintoduced. They are transplanted,or hatchery escapee. Who adapted and are spawning. So to a point, they are hatchery fish. J.C.B

J. C. B

We have been down this path before..........What fun!!!! Makes me want to start a bonkathon..

Spawnout

Right on, deep six all of the commercials...I am sure an orgaonized sport loby would have more power to get the habitat protection we all want. Getting organized is the hard part. I had some of that Chillian Atlantic not to long ago, and not only was it cheap, but it tasted great too!!

Wishen.....What is Chilian Atlantic? Is it an atlantic salmon farmed in Chile?

BigShark

You are correct sir. It is a farm fish from Chile.....Last fall they flooded the market with them..
The Columbia netters were so p*ssed off, they took a bunch of silvers to Oly and passed them out on the capitol steps. The farm fish had dropped the bottom out of the comercially caught fish.......

WAHHH!!! We can't make any money gill netting these fish so we will just give them away.

I bet they would have made somebody some money as a sport caught fish.....What do you think?

SOOO SAD!!!

Wishin.....you bet they would make some money as sportcaught. When I see what happens every year in Alaska I can't help thinking what the Columbia could mean to OR & WA. Sure the Kenia has some bigger, a lot bigger...but the key word is... some
What is caught up there on average isn't much bigger. At times not much more in numbers by the sportfishermen. Their bread and butter is the Red or aka Sockeye. On a good day buoy 10 fishery will
beat almost all AK fisheries. What a waste of such a terrific resourse we have in the Columbia.

Rep. Mark Doumit, a liberal democrat, is a commercial gillnetter that fishes the Columbia.

Most of the Columbia River gillnet boats are now owned by big-money investors looking for ways to write off large sums of business losses to counterbalance their gains in other areas. They're doctors, attorneys, people like that. This is why they continue to go out, year after year, losing large sums of money in the process. This is also why they will pay the premium to buy the tangle nets instead of fighting it.

If these were solely family operations then they would have quit a long time ago.

Last year with the price of silvers bottoming out the gill-netters were continuing to fish because it meant greaters losses=greater write-offs for the boat owners. In Portland when the homeless camp was being moved around town and they were headline news for awhile the gill-netters took advantage of the opportunity to get press about their "plight" and donated fish to the camp.

The arguement about "gill-netting for the family heritage aspect" is a cover for what is really going on, and what is really going on smells to no end.