As I was driving down hospital hill in Aberdeen after finishing surgery today, I was thinking about the gorgeous fall afternoon, the blue-bird skies, and how pleasant it might have been to chase three tides over mill-pond seas on what should have been the VERY best day of salmon fishing of the season in Grays Harbor. What a glory day it would have been.

Thanks WDFW, thanks.... for an opportunity loss that can NEVER be recovered or replaced. Think about it, folks.... for as long as we live, we will never ever get this day back. EVER! The license-buying public is getting royally screwed. In fairness, there ought to at least be a pro-rated rebate on the annual license to offset the opportunity losses that we are forced to swallow each time WDFW does something like this.

I'm figuring I got 16-18 good years left... MAX! Each and every opportunity to get out and enjoy the activity I love the most is something very precious to me. In this life, the raw truth is that there are no "make up days" for golden opportunities lost... they are simply gone.

My dissatisfaction meter with WDFW is at red-line as I type this. Conservation and allocation recommendations ignored... a forgotten constituency of frustrated anglers.... irreplacable opportunities stolen from the recreational users.... this is the irrefutable legacy of the state's present-day fish managers.

AND GODAMMIT THAT MAKES ME MAD!

Saying that the state even manages the resource is a stretch. They seem to think that putting the screws to the user group that takes the smallest percentage of the fish and not worrying about the the others is solid management. I really love to fish and thats probably the only reason i still do. Seeing what goes on in this state can be sickening. I have seen rivers closed to all fishing due to low water and no excapement because the river is being netted too much, so the sport fishery closes but the nets stay in? What the hell is that? Management?
I have also been thouroughly frustrated with enforcement. A couple years ago we were checked by wdfw off lapush. I see the boat checking someone else and I let the guys know were going to get checked. I was sure we were all legal but one of my friends decideds to reel in and double check his barbs cause he had just retied.They were fine, as were 2 other rigs the 3 of us were fishing with. I didn't reel in cause I knew my barbs were pinched, as always. They come over, check us.....everything is in order. I'm expecting to hear...ok guys....have a good day. What I hear is "The problem we have is we watched all of you reel in and pinch your barbs through binocs" OMG i was ready to SWIM over to that boat and have a "friendly discussion" with them. I was yelling at them to "write me a ticket!" over and over. They didn't write a ticket for something that didn't happen. Way to go guys! They probably realized that we hadn't done it after a short "discussion" and then let me know that reeling in when they are around looks suspicious. I kid you not! I guess when a wdfw boat is in sight you can't check your bait. We had another encounter in the san juans fishing for lings last year. To keep it short a friend and I bolth got tickets for having barbed hooks. We were fising with 6 oz leadhead and plastic worm. We had pinched the barbs down but there was a very small gap between the tip of the barb and the shank of the hook. I couldn't get my thumbnail between it and those are large barbs. I've spent over an hour on the phone with Mike Cenci, head of the marine division enforcement, on these two incedents. This is how we are treated as sport fisherman. Hard to take!

Yeah, I was off work around 3pm today and it would have been a great tide and afternoon to spend down there tossing spinners and enjoying the weather. It pisses me off thinking about it. There's not a ton of fish there yet, what, a couple per day might get caught, maybe? What's wrong with having that north bank open so we can fish, visit, enjoy, and be able to keep one if we do catch one? What really chaps me is that fnp and some others went to the meeting and ASKED for this. They saw fit to spend their time and energy and ask for this harmless and local favorite through the proper channels, hoping to be taken seriously, and the request considered. I would think that WFDW, when approached by respected local representatives of the sportfishing community, would at least have the respect to consider the source and give a clear and VALID reason why. Low holed by WDFW, low holed by the tribes on Oct 1st. Whose salaries do our fishing licenses pay for? Where does all the money go? I am as concerned about the decision making that went into denying us this simple and traditional fishing request (my family has been fishing the Chehalis and GH for 5 generations, it's in my blood), as I am about the bad and suspect data supporting the month long controversial Chehalis chinook "season".

I don't know where to start. I'm joining the CCA unless someone gives me a good reason not to. Money talks.

A change in the directorship may help get the issues of sports fishers better addressed. As it stands now the director serves at the pleasure of the commission, if he makes the commissioners happy he gets to stay. I believe the commission is tipped toward commercial interests, which helps explain some of the actions of WDFW.

What may help is passage of legislation making the director appointed by, and responsible to, the governor. Last year House Bill 1193 and Senate Bill 5364 did just that. Each of these bills is alive for the upcoming session. Not surprisingly these bills were opposed by commercial groups and legislators supported by them.

We would probably have a better chance of having our concerns addressed by a governor's appointee who understands the financial impact of sport fishing on local communities as opposed to the limited financial impact of commercial fisheries. Because, if you want to get elected you need to be able to bring jobs and money to voting people around the state.

Ok I'll get off my soap box now.

fishNphysician


Doc,
I hear you.

Back when I got out of the military there were a few guys who shared thier skills with me. It was therapy for me as I had lost some of my vision in a mishap on an airfield. Anyway these guys are less mobile now. I can still drive to fish other areas but, my mentors cannot.
This is something that they have earned by thier service to our country.

Aunty M, I agree that CCA may be our best shot to get some political muscle, it has worked elsewhere so there is no reason to assume it wouldn't here.

I just believe having a governor who could hold accountable and fire a director would be better than it is today, and so do my friends who work supporting the sport fish industry selling boats, representing trades, and are former commission members and WDFW.

For instance in my world of pensions the state had a myriad of boards that covered different employees then in the 70s lumped everyone together and one group made policy decisions for the whole. Naturally the small groups, like mine, got left out of policy changes/improvements with the focus on larger "stakeholders".

In the end my small group of employees formed their own governance board and things are better, we get results. In my opinion sport fishers are like my small employee group when competing for policy direction with the commission/director. That is why I feel having a governor appointment would give us more leverage than with a commission appointment, simple lobbying power. I see how it works every day.

I think many may have different opinions but at least we are all striving toward the same goal, enhancing opportunity for future generations like my two little boys.

Merch

Unfortunatly management at DFW fails to see the larger issue. "Managers" view each species in issolation. They promote the most harmful and least sustainable method of commercial harvest.
The resource has been depleted. Why the need for the hatchery fish as nutrients in the upper watershed?

I'm not politicly correct but this whole midset at DFW has caused serious harm to any future opportunity.

Every Spring i volunteer for a couple of weeks at my local shools as an Aquatic Education instructor and hand out litter bags. This also has the Angler's Code of Ethics; perhaps Staff should read the first one again and then reread the sixth.:

By many I meant those of us in the sport community have different opinions about how we should get to the same end. Not the department.

slabhunter, way to go on educating kids most parents probably have no idea about the troubles our fish face, they just go to the store and there it is. I like the list of ethics also.

Merch

Yeah, I tell the young anglers it's up to them, what becomes of our oportunities. Handing out the litter bags just re-enforces issues facing our Northwest icon.

Lord only knows how long we wil live. I hope at least a few of the students carry on in the endeavor to ensure public access to our resource.

I also set on the Chehalis advisory committee as the Doc, & it is very frustrating. At the last Chehalis "local" meeting in Olympia, before the NOF this spring, (the Doc was not there because of committments) as a kind of afterthought Region 6 Fish Manager, Ron Warren said "oh yes, you will get the bank fishery". We were told that we did not need to go the the Lynnwood NOF meeting because everything was hashed out at this Olympia meeting. We thaught that this bank fishery was a go until we saw it not published in the regs. It seems to me that this was just another diversion to keep us from going to Lynnwood to the final NOF meeting.

Last year on the 1st day of Chinook fishing at Johns River, WDFW did not have a fish checker at the Westport launch. When I asked Ron why not, his response was that typically very few boats launch there. My response was that about all the boats 20' & over usually launch from that point. I think it was on purpose to not get a total count. And yet they had a checker at the Cosy launch out of the area. Then when we tried to get them to cut the season of because we were overfished for both the non-tribal commercial & sports, they would not do it. It seems odd that approx 350 fish in one day & the next days the reported catch was from the teens to 40 some fish. Very suspicious in my eyes.

So, as I understand things, this coho closure was to ensure a chinook fishery in the bay???

Now that the lower Columbia tribs closed for chinook won't there be more pressure up here? Seems like there are only a couple of hundred chinook to go around.

Wouldn't it be a better use of our impacts; to allow the coho fishery in the drainage and just have to release the few chinook?

This is the opinion piece that I have submitted to the local paper... hope to see it in print this Friday:




As anglers busily prepare this weekend for the much anticipated opening day of the Grays Harbor salmon season on Monday, I cringe to think about how many chinook salmon will perish during the month-long kill fishery sanctioned by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife this fall.

WDFW is recklessly basing its proposed October 1-31 chinook retention season in the bay and the mainstem Chehalis on a highly speculative harvest model that significantly underestimates exploitation rates in the sport fishery. The 2007 chinook return is only expected to yield a non-treaty harvestable share of 1642 Chehalis-bound chinook, with predicted sport harvests of 667 fish in the mainstem Chehalis River and 501 fish in the bay for a total of 1168 paper fish. This translates to an average harvest of just 21 fish per day in the river, and only 16 fish per day in the bay. Thirty-one days of chinook retention will almost certainly result in much larger real-life harvests because of the present-day fleet’s ability to very effectively exploit chinook returning to the basin. Allow me to illustrate this with the 2006 season as an example.

In 2006, there were 462 non-treaty chinook available for harvest. WDFW insisted that this measly “surplus” could easily support 15 days of chinook retention in the bay with enough leftover fish to cover release mortalities in the concurrent non-treaty gillnet fishery. WRONG! Over 350 chinook perished on opening day alone! By the most conservative estimates, at least 716 were retained in the sportfishery by season’s end, or about 48 fish per day. This is three times the exploitation rate predicted by the harvest model for 2007.

How can managers rationalize a paltry 2007 prediction of only 501 chinook salmon taken over 31 fishing days when immediate past experience clearly demonstrates that the sport fleet can easily harvest 716 fish in half the time? Do they really believe that allowing fishing for over twice as long can realistically result in 30% fewer fish retained? Do they?

If sport fishermen retain three times as many fish as the harvest model predicts, then without some voluntary self-restraint from participating anglers, they would be expected to take over 3500 chinook … more than twice the entire non-treaty share! And that does not even consider the chinook impact of commercial gillnets!

Moreover, participation in Grays Harbor sport fisheries is expected to be extraordinarily high due to poor salmon forecasts in other regions of the state. To make matters worse, chinook salmon fishing has just been closed in the mainstem Columbia River and all of its major Southwest Washington tributaries (Washougal Lewis, Kalama, Cowlitz, Toutle, Green, and Elochoman Rivers). Angling pressure from those streams will be displaced to the closest and most convenient area open to chinook retention…. you guessed it, Grays Harbor and the Chehalis Basin!

Between the non-treaty gillnetters legally retaining “incidental” chinook, the tribal gillnetters liberally targeting chinook, and the masses of sport fishermen expected to partake in the chinook kill season, WDFW has set up the “perfect storm” next month for unparalleled exploitation of Chehalis-bound chinook salmon.

If you plan to fish local waters for salmon, I would urge you to limit your individual chinook impact in some meaningful way. I am not suggesting that you adopt a “release-them-all” stance as biologists believe harvestable chinook are available in limited numbers. I simply ask that you pause and consider which ones are worth bonking before you decide to wield the wood shampoo.

How can you help? Consider a self-imposed seasonal limit. Instead of filling your salmon tag with chinook, you could target more of basin’s abundant coho. Or maybe consider retaining only those that are mortally wounded by the hooking encounter. You might think about keeping only fin-clipped chinook. You could release all the big fish for quality breeding stock, or perhaps make it a point to release all the hens (females). The choice is yours.

I’m calling out to the conservationist in each and every one of you! If we want chinook salmon to return in healthy numbers in the years to come, it’s our collective responsibility to be a little “softer” on the resource when the need arises. It’s clear our state’s fish managers are unwilling to step up to the plate. Are you?

Great read Francis, and to me it all makes sense. Lets hope others are listening too, including members of the WDFW.

Steve

Bravo. That is really well written. I think your synopsis at the end asking for folks to be "softer" is a great way to put it. It sounds way more inviting than "Don't keep any chinook, or you are just as bad as the WDFW, QINs and commercials." I think that by not putting a line in the sand to separate sporties (chinook killers from the antis), but to get them to think is the exact right way to approach that.

I have been thinking about what I will do on our boat this year if chinooks are caught and while I will probably not keep any for personal consumption, I will just ask the guys with me to think about what they are doing before the priest comes out. Except for jacks, I will probably kill them and eat them shortly after.

Yeah I originally had a different ending to the letter, but after last year's debacle and the darts I had to dodge against my hard-line C&R stance (even from guys on this board), I decided I better put my politically correct hard hat on instead and came up with a more palatable plea to the public.

Thanks for noticing!

The op-ed piece ran in today's Daily World. Sorry but no web link to that page.

I heard that the tribes had already done a "test fishery" in the bay and were disappointed that their haul was only 2500 fish instead of the anticipated 3500. Any truth to that rumor? I guess we will see if they deploy all their nets Sunday as scheduled.

oh im sure they will deploy the nets as scheduled... unless we get major rain and the chehalis get to high and muddie then they will get make up days...

That was no "test" fishery... it was their scheduled 96-hour 2C opener (Humptulips estuary). Nets went in at 2PM Sunday... Mon... Tue... Wed... Thu.... nets out at 2PM.

Not sure about the actual catch landed to date as the "official" numbers seem to be shrouded in great secrecy until they have had the chance to massage them. But there ought to be a dcocument around that spells out what the projected/expected catch should have been as part of the signed co-management plan.

QIN nets hit the rest of the bay and lower Chehalis for 72 hours beginning at noon this Sunday (day before our sport opener)... Mon... Tue... out at noon, then immediately right back to 2C for another 96 hours at noon Tue... Wed... Thu... Fri.. Sat... out at noon.

Right back to the rest of the bay and lower Chehalis at noon on Sun... Mon... Tue... out at noon. Then right back to 2C for another 96 hours Tue... Wed... Thu.... Fri... Sat... out at 2 PM.

Anybody see a pattern here?

QIN nets are basically targeting Chehalis fish 3 days a week and Hump fish 5 days a week. In-river netting in the Hump pretty much mirrors the netting in the Hump estuary, only staggered by a few hours to take advantage of the tides.

5 days a week?

And I have to release unclipped coho? Not that I mind releasing wild coho. I just don't like having to do in order to subsidize the Quinault's fishery. I think I'm becomming a redneck. The lack of conservation in the Harbor fisheries is rubbing me the wrong way.