A friend of mine was fishing Tumbling Rappids on the Sol Duc and saw a guy fishing a gill net, he reported the guy to local law enforcement and he was caught and fined $1500.00.

Im sure it was the same guy that lost his other net set near the same location a couple weeks earlier as this is not a normal wide spread thing.

Oh yeah and it wasnt stlhd2ho either.

God I cant spell!!! I need to fix this

email me rich

Good to hear they got the guy. When I stayed at Eric's he said the guy, maybe his neighbor, would run out in the middle of the night with his mortorcycle "draggin somethin." Not too slick if ya ask me.


Probably all Native fish up there too, if there are even any up that high yet.

Glad they busted the jerks, that is a low-down stupid way to make some $$......

So was this "Gillnetter" Tribal? No one mentions that...... Don't hear of many poacher white-boys that use gillnets.... They usually just snag....

MC

Yep almost all native fish up there with a few snider fish.

Nope not a tribal member, no reason for them to be up there anyways when they can do it legal down below, it was a piece of white trailor trash who lived right there in sapho.

Maybe a little grey bar hotel time will teach him the error of his ways. Particularily if a 6'-8" 280 lb cell mate takes a "liking" to him.

So was this POS selling them? Isn't it hard enough for non-tribal people to sell commercially as to make it not worth the risk (as salmon price is soooo low)?
What was the deal with this guy? How large of gill net? How many did he take?
This just baffles me......

MC

MC,

Dont know the answer to your questions.

I would suspect he is smoking them, cant see where he could get enough to actually make any money selling them.

Id suspect he would only get 2 or 3 a day up there if the net was set all the time, more with high water maybe.

the net we found was a 25 foot or so mono gill net with 4 inch mesh or so, dont know about the one he had this time.

glad to hear that, makes me happy!

Mastercaster, you might not hear about it, but it happens, not lots, but enough to be a concern. Whatever method they use -- gillnets, dynamite ("Du Pont spinners"), snagging and just fishing every day and overlimiting when the fishing is good -- poachers find ready markets for their fish because they sell at lower prices than legally caught fish. This includes friends, neighbors, restaurants and fish markets. Plenty of restaurants and fish markets have been busted over the years for buying fish caught illegally. Poachers don't sell to licensed fish buyers like legal commercial fishermen, who get very low prices, they sell direct to people, markets and restaurants, cutting out the middeman.

MC: Salmonbelly is right. Poaching is a far bigger problem than many folk know. There are so many a*****ls out there breaking the law you just can't imagine.

I did a piece on deer poaching years ago. Sitting around with the game wardens waiting for some fool to shot out decoy deer was a real eye opener for me. There are a few hardcore poachers the gamies all know, that get busted with great regularity and who seem to get back on the river in nothing flat. Many of these scum buckets have no assets to no job no ambition and simply no ethics. We need much tougher sentencing for poaching, but the uninformed public doesn’t support it. (By the way EVERY time they set out the decoy deer someone shoots it!)

I have already heard several commentators; yes both right wing and left wing, making fun of the relatively hard sentence given to the repeat felon geoduck poachers. The spiel goes something like this "Jeesh, they give a child molester six months probation and yet a guy digging a few extra clams gets ten years.” We all know the clam poacher deserved what he got; as for the child molester the problem is that we don’t have capital punishment for them. The problem IS NOT that we have too heavy sentencing for serious poaching.

I would like to see selling illegally caught fish a felony, with a minimum of one year in jails, and any restaurant selling fish not purchased through legal means shut down for a month. That would stop this crap FAST!