So the Skokomish tribal nets are out 24/7 again on lower Hood Canal. Tied to my beach, and the points up and down the canal. Catching silvers and chum. It got me wondering...

I have not caught a single silver from my boat or beach this year. Well, I caught a lot of pound size fish but none of the larger ones. I heard folks weren't doing well overall sportfishing.

But the nets that are left out and barely tended to (checked once every 24 hours) seem to pick up the bigger fish just fine. And I wondered - how can the tribes be catching 'half' the allocatted fish ? I sure don't think the sportsmen are catching half the allocated fish? How can this be right? If the sportsmen aren't catching half is the tribe catching more than their share? And if I understand things right the coho populations are so small compared to historical numbers - is 'half' of what we have now acceptable to even catch? It's like saying - the pie was 1000 pounds 100 years ago but now it weighs 1 pound - so non tribal folks can eat 2/5 and the tribe can eat 2/5. leaving 1/5 to escape back to a hatchery somewhere. Meanwhile the wild fish that were around continue to be swallowed in gillnets. Seems to be lousy calculations to better a species populations...

More often than not, in my observations, living on the Canal, sportsfishing for silvers in Hood Canal is poor. Every 5 or 6 years we'll get a good run. But man, I'd really like to see fish populations improve.

Please don't get me wrong - I support the tribes right to fish, but it seems we really need to end gillnetting, lock down on the allocated tribal fishing licenses, start troll catching and getting the numbers back up. (and if elected, I will...)

I know - historical practices have hurt salmon (logging, mining, dams, fishing, etc) - but the tribal commercail gillnets really can't be improving things. I just wonder who the hell is saying sportsfishermen are catching half the fish? Becuase it's been obvious to me they don't seem to be and the tribe is taking a whole lot of fish.

Again, I respect the tribes right to fish but it seems like they have just replaced poor fishing practices of the past by non-tribal commercial fisherman. The canal used to be GREAT fishing. now it's really usualy very poor.

I just want to see the fishing improve...

MY fmaily has had property on the Tahuya River since 1960. I wrote the followinfg because of what i saw happen to the coho there. Hope it helps explain a few things.

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The Last Coho
By Dave Vedder

Authors note: The following is a fictional work. But I have made every effort to base the story on solid biological facts and events that have occurred in many parts of the Northwest. There is no Olympic River, but events much like I describe have happened in altogether too many rivers.

Coho drew his first breath in the chill waters of the Olympic River, on a dark and windy day in April of 2006. The foreboding day was perhaps an omen that Coho’s life would not be an easy one. It was a miracle that Coho’s parents successfully spawned in the fall of 2005. (The eggs laid that fall we will call the brood of 2005) Like all Pacific salmon, Coho’s parents had run a gauntlet of predators, floods, gill nets, and sports anglers to reach the spawning grounds. Coho’s parents were among only fourteen coho that successfully spawned that year. Coho’s grandparents were part of a run that numbered more than two hundred pairs. The decline in the Olympic’s wild coho had been rapid and dramatic. There were too many problems to point a finger at any one culprit. But one thing was certain, if Coho and his siblings didn’t survive to spawn, they would be the last wild salmon in the Olympic River.

When he emerged from the gravel, Coho was roughly an inch long. At this early stage of life Coho was what the biologists call an alevin. Coho saw that he was not alone. Hundreds more alevins surrounded him. Of the roughly 24,000 eggs laid the previous fall, about 4,500 hatched into alevins. From the instant Coho emerged as an alevin danger stalked him

Coho was programmed with marvelously complex instincts passed down from millennia of wild ancestors. Those instincts lead him to find shelter in the quiet waters beneath an undercut bank. Coho’s survival instincts were reinforced when a four-inch long sculpin ambushed his school, inhaling one of his hapless brethren.

For the rest of the spring and summer Coho and the Olympic River brood of 2005 spent every moment avoiding danger or searching for food. Danger came from all directions. Fish ducks were a constant threat. Twice Coho barely escaped with his life when a shadow from above materialized into a ravenous merganser. Many of Coho’s group were not so fortunate. Danger also came from below, as cutthroat trout slashed through the school of tiny coho, gulping their hapless prey one at a time.












In late May a hatchery truck dumped 150,000 hatchery coho smolts into the river. These foreign invaders swept down the river like locusts in a field of grain. They ate every speck of food available and even attacked some of Coho’s wild relatives.

The next few weeks were grim. Coho lost weight. It was a constant struggle to find enough food to sustain him while trying to avoid predators that seemed to be twice as aggressive once the easy meals of hatchery fish were gone. Predators and natural mortality further reduced the brood of 2005. By now the brood of 2005 numbered less than 2,200

Fall and winter brought new opportunities and new challenges. The first gentle rains raised the river and provided Coho with quiet side channels where he felt safe and where food was once again plentiful. In November the rains turned violent. For two days the heavens opened, dropping more than five inches of rain. Coho’s gentle side channel rose suddenly. The once clean water turned a filthy brown, and the currents grew ever stronger. Clear cuts high in the headwaters of the Olympic had laid the earth open to the rains. Poorly built logging roads crumbled and slid into small tributaries.

Coho fought valiantly to hold his position in the swirling brown water. Suddenly a small branch, borne by the racing water, hit coho. Disoriented, he tumbled helplessly out of control, swept headlong downstream. He struggled against the raging water eventually finding himself in a calm back eddy formed behind the root ball of an ancient fir tree.

As the Olympic receded, Coho saw that the streambed was now covered with mud. The insects that Coho had relied on were swept away or covered with silt. His world was now barren and hostile. Many of his wild brothers and sisters had perished.

As winter progressed, the Olympic slowly became cleaner. Coho found life improving everyday. He had grown too big to be challenged by sculpins and small trout. He was now three and one half inches long and had reached the size biologist referring to as fingerlings. Food was seldom abundant and predators remained a constant danger, but Coho slowly gained weight and grew stronger.

The spring of 2007 brought more rain and high water. Coho found himself swept down river by strong currents and an even stronger instinct that urged him to leave his river, for where he did not know. He was now five inches long. He had grown to what biologists refer to as a smolt.

For three days Coho drifted downstream with the current. The rest of the brood of 2005 did the same. On the third day of his migration Coho noticed that the river had slowed until there was almost no current and the water now carried a salty tang. The salt irritated Coho’s gills, but his instincts told him he must press on.





For two days coho wandered around the estuary, letting his body gradually adapt to the salt water. Once he was fully acclimated, Coho and his group entered the open waters of Hood Canal. The pure, clean salt water invigorated Coho. The abundance of food was astounding. Tasty tidbits were everywhere. Amphipods and euphasids were plentiful. Life in the salt water seemed very good until they encountered the seals.

As Coho and his school moved toward the mouth of Olympic Bay, a huge black shadow appeared above them. Instinctively, the brood of 2005 huddled together. This time instinct betrayed them. A herd of seals that had been sunning themselves on a log boom had spotted Coho’s school. They attacked from every direction. Seals darted into the tightly packed ball of small salmon, greedily gulping down as many as they could gather into their gaping mouths. For one sickening instant Coho felt himself in the maw of a huge male seal. Suddenly, the seal began snapping his head back and forth to funnel the fish down his throat. Miraculously, Coho slipped from the seal’s mouth and splashed back in to the water.

The attack continued until Coho’s school was scattered and too few remained to interest the seals. The attack devastated the brood of 2005. They now numbered less than seven hundred.

Coho and the others were drawn toward the open Pacific by an overpowering urge. As if by magic, they unerringly made their way through Hood Canal, into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and into the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally they encountered schools of coho from other rivers. Often they would travel with the other schools and intermingle with them. Each school of fish, in response to their unique instincts, would turn to follow the path their ancestors had chosen.

Coho and the school he fell in with worked their way up west side of Vancouver Island, often. traveling as much as twenty miles a day drifting with the northward currents. Slowly the school split into many groups, each following an instinct we humans have little understanding of. Life was good in the ocean. Predators were few and food was amazingly abundant. Every week Coho grew fatter and stronger

As fall approached, Coho found himself off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Here he spent the next 12 months foraging in some of the most fertile waters of the world. Herring schools were so large as to defy imagination. Crab spawn formed clouds hundreds of feet thick and as long as a football field. When Coho arrived in the northern waters, he was about twelve inches long and weighed nearly a pound. In the next months life was as good as it ever could be. Coho gorged himself every day. By the spring of 2008 he was a fat, five-pound beauty. Coho’s belly was stretched with food and rapidly developing twin sperm sacks.


Perhaps it was the development of his sexual organs, perhaps the length of the days, perhaps some other signal we will never understand, but by mid summer of 2008 Coho felt an overwhelming urge to return to the Olympic River.




The months in the north had been good to the brood of 2005, but predation had continued. Some had lost their lives to seals and sea lions, and piscatorial predators, such as lingcod, mackerel and hake, had taken their toll too. Others had succumbed to sports anglers and several died in nets designed to take bottomfish. By the time the Olympic River brood of 2005 headed toward the Olympic River, they numbered less than seventy. Little did they know the perils that lay ahead.

As Coho and others headed down the coast of Vancouver Island they encountered fleets of commercial salmon trollers. Each troller was outfitted with as many as one hundred glittering lures that imitated the look and action of a wounded bait fish. Many of Coho’s school were mesmerized by the shiny lures. Time and again Coho saw his companions strike the shimmering lures. Every time the result was the same. The fish was immediately impaled on a huge hook. Fight as they might, they seldom escaped. Eventually, their frantic struggles subdued as the rush of water forced through their open mouth drowned them. Nothing coho had seen since the seals in Hood Canal had been so destructive. The trollers seemed to cover every inch of the water from top to bottom.

The entire journey from Vancouver Island to Hood Canal was a gauntlet of death. Trollers worked almost every point and passage. Each fleet of trollers took an additional toll on Coho’s Olympic River brethren.


How Coho was able to so unerringly find his way back to the Washington coast, we may never know, but his navigation instincts were perfect. Coho reached the Straits of Juan de Fuca in the last week of September. As he approached the Washington coast, Coho’s extraordinarily sensitive nostrils picked up the scent of the Olympic River. As impossible as it seems, Coho could detect scents diluted to a level of four or five parts per million, and one of those parts he smelled came from the Olympic!.


When Coho and the Olympic River brood of 2005 entered the Straits of Juan de Fuca, their numbers had dwindled to 36, but they were magnificent. In the last few months Coho had evolved into a marvelous eating machine. He was now eating as much as 10% of his body weight per day! He now weighed more than sixteen pounds. He was fat, feisty and decidedly beautiful.


The Straits of Juan de Fuca presented Coho and his flock with yet another challenge. Not coincidentally, the sport-fishing season was open. Coho’s school and schools from a score of other river entered the Straits. In addition to all the beautiful wild coho, the Straits were chock full of hatchery origin coho returning to dozens of hatcheries scattered around Puget Sound.







Sports anglers, deprived of angling opportunities in many other waters, descended on the Straits in hordes. These anglers used even more sophisticated lures and baits than the commercial trollers. Many more of Coho’s school succumbed to cut plug herring, bucktail flies and Buzz Bombs. Sportsmen were not allowed to intentionally kill wild coho, but many died from mishandling and hooks in gills and other vital areas. By the time Coho and his school turned south into Hood Canal they numbered less than less than thirty.

Coho moved into Hood Canal in early October. He was immediately joined by huge schools of chum salmon. The chums were a scraggly lot, with protruding teeth, dark bellies and huge purple slashes across their flanks. Coho’s ancestors had also joined with chums in their journey through Hood Canal, but each year the number of chums grew while the number of coho diminished.

After the commercial fleet had decimated Coho’s ancestors in the late 70's, hatcheries began producing millions of chum for the commercial fleet and local Indian tribes. Now chums filled the Canal by the hundreds of thousands. The hordes of Chum salmon didn’t bother Coho. The gill nets did.


Hood Canal was choked with gill nets. The nylon walls of death were as much as 600 yards long. Every net was filled with chums, their gills trapped in the web, their lifeless bodies floating in the current like ghosts. Unfortunately, many of Coho’s kind also fell prey to the nets. For miles the nets challenged any salmon that approached. Coho followed a route that steered clear of the nets, but many of his small band suffocated in nets designed to harvest the hatchery reared chums. Almost twenty five percent of the remaining coho perished in the nets. The brood year of 2005 now numbered only twenty two.

Coho’s band approached the Olympic River in late October. Safely past the nets, it looked as if the brood of 2005 would be make it back to ensure the future of their race, but they still had to get past the seals that had done so much damage two years earlier.


Somewhere near the mouth of the Olympic River, Coho fell in with a fat, beautiful female. From the time Coho saw his future mate, he never again left her side. Instinct told him he must guard her from other males that would spawn with her if given a chance.

Coho and the female felt an increased sense of urgency as they entered the Olympic. The familiar scent of the river where they spent their youth spurred them on. Coho’s mate was now fat with more than 2,500 eggs and Coho’s sperm sacks were full to bursting. Their time was near.








The Olympic disgorges through a narrow neck into Hood Canal. Seals long ago learned that salmon are easy quarry when they squeeze through the gap to enter the river. The seals were initially drawn to the narrow gap by schools of hatchery reared coho that had arrived a few days before Coho‘s group. The remnants of Coho’s school began passing through the gap on the twenty-third of September. It was a bloodbath. The first of Coho’s group to enter the river was grabbed by an old male seal. The huge seal held the hapless coho high above the water shaking it like a toy. The ill fated salmon was torn in half. The head and shoulders of the magnificent fish broke free and drifted to the bottom of the river. The seal gulped down the other half.


For the next three days the survivors of the brood of 2005 struggled to make it past the phalanx of ravenous seals. Many failed. In the dark of the night Coho and his mate slipped past the seals and entered the Olympic River. They were among the fortunate few to make it. By October twenty-seventh, only three fish remained from the brood of 2005 – Coho, another male and the female. Not enough to assure the continuation of the species but enough to hold out faint hope.


The lower stretch of the Olympic is deep and slow. For two days Coho and the remnants of his school made excellent progress toward the clean gravel upriver. The upper river was another story. One hundred year floods had scoured the Olympic nearly every year for the past decade. Silt and gravel had filled in the deep pools forcing the river into a dozen small channels. Coho and the female using their marvelous instincts somehow found the right channel and made their way to the very pool in which they were born. The lone male accompanied them. The female now full to bursting with mature eggs, began digging a redd in the gravel within a few feet of where her mother and grandmother had done the same.


The three remaining coho were showing the strain of their journey. Their backs had turned from silver blue to a dusky copper. Coho’s belly had turned a deep red. Open sores formed on his back. The female’s fins and tail were tattered from digging in the sharp stones. Her gill plate carried a bride’s blush of pink.

Coho became agitated and aggressive. He was wary of every shadow, and he was ready to defend his mate from all dangers, real and imagined. Coho was concerned by the lone male. He knew the stranger would make every effort to spawn with his female if given a chance.

When Coho saw the other male too close to his mate he rushed at him, ramming the stranger in the belly with his hooked snout. An angler, fishing illegally, in a closed river, saw the commotion and tossed a spinner toward the female. She turned and snapped at the glittering spinner. In an instant she was hooked and an instant later she was drug up on the beach. As the angler proudly held the fat female up for his friends to see, eggs spewed from her in a steady stream. Not understanding, or perhaps not caring, what he was doing, the angler lifted her by the gills. He held her that way for more than a minute while his friend took picture after picture to record the great catch. The angler then dropped the stricken female onto the gravel and kicked her back into the river.

Her gills were irreparably damaged and her spine was torn from the terrible strain of lifting her out of the water. She was doomed. She struggled over to Coho, rubbed her lateral line against her mate one last time, and then slowly sank to the bottom.

Coho and the stranger waited in the pool, for what they did not know. Several times Coho swam up to the female’s lifeless body to nuzzle her with his nose, but she could not respond. Coho swam aimlessly up and down the pool. A week after the female died the lone male grew too weak to fight the current. He gave up and was swept downriver out of sight. Coho lasted a few more days. In the end he his heart gave out.

The bodies of Coho the other survivors from the class of 2005 slowly disintegrated. The nutrition from Coho’s flesh should have helped feed his offspring, but that was not to be. For Coho was the last wild salmon in the Olympic River.

Yeah, Thanks Dave. Great story. We've had our sprread (past tahuya, around the bend) since the 30s. I just spoke to a couple tribal guys picking their nets of Coho and a few Chum...

I am glad they North fork of the Skok is getting attention and more water flow. But what for, so more nets can get more fish? Makes no sense to me.

Not only that but the Big sea Run cutts we get must also be getting in the nets. The fishing for them was amazing just before the nets went in, then. Nothing... I figure some made it upriver, some were netted. I love the SRCs. Best catch and release fishery and so unique. Trout in saltwater...

We watched nets pulled from Hood Canal, with the smaller fish being knocked ( read "smashed") out of the net and back into the water by netters with shovels. By-kill is not counted; in fact, only what is reported is counted.

Good point about 1/2 the harvestable. With the Everett derby and all Puget Sound so low, how is it that net seasons remain unaltered, even when NEW DATA proves it.

I used to do spawner surveys on all of the major canal systems back in the early 1980's. Tahuya was one of my favorites - I remember seeing some nice coho crashing in there with the first good rain in October. There was a good hole right by a big barn just up from tidewater. Summer chum were pretty much extinct at that time due to the overlap with intensive coho net fishery. Pinks over on the Hamma Hamma were just about gone too. There was little attention payed to escapement needs for natural production then since it was all managed as a hatchery show - primarily for kings and coho. Purse seines gill nets, you name it. The late chum fisheries were minimal and there wasn't an overlap with the coho fishery, so there were still quite a few of those around. Funny how people never considered targeting them then, and now look at the chum anglers covering every tributary. Over in the Dewatto basin, the only coho I saw were 2-3 lb dinks. Probably all that could get through the nets. Sad because I know people who used to fish for big silvers with flies on top of the water in the bay there every November. Fish near 20 lbs were caught. None of those big fish are left. Lots of poaching was going on for the few fish that did come back - Union River kings were a big target. I found plenty ov chum stripped of their eggs up in the small tributuaries. So it wasn't all tribal and commercial to blame.

Sad to see it all happening right before my eyes. Most people didn't even notice the change.

Milt: Do you rememeber the old hermit who lived on a houseboat in Dewatto Bay? He sold shrimp and whatever to make a few buck. That bay was alive with big coho in the fall. Often they had lockjaw, but they were there in big numbers. The habitat on the Dewatto doesn't seem much degraded so I have to blame over harvest.

As far as the nets getting the big cutts, I don't doubt it . They should still be around in the bay now. We used to catch them up to Thanksgiving.

I don't remember that particular guy - Not surprised to hear about him though. Beautiful spot to be a tramp.

Dewatto has those nice big wetlands upstream, perfect for coho rearing. I understand there's a lot of work going on in the system to restore the runs. Doesn't appear to be a habitat issue to me either though. Seems like you build up the fish numbers and the nets will follow, so what's the use anyway?

Its just plain sickning what is happening. I'm not against tribal fishing. But I am against tribal (co) management of the resource. It is really a conflict of interest. You can't leave the resource to the fisherman (us included) to manage.

As a matter of public record and management WDFW post creel reports weekly. Why, as a matter of public record, can't we view tribal catches and bi-catches? It is our resource!

This coho season is shaping out to be really poor. Maybe the tribes, commercials, and sport fishers should all pull out for the year... or a few years.

Yeah, there are lots of reasons for the decline but we have to get the fish back to the spawning grounds...PERIOD.

Just my two cents.

Last year I was fishing in West Pass for sea runs with the bug rod and saw a few tribal gillnetters setting beach seins for the returning coho. While the nets were soaking I started to talk to them and next thing you know they let me peek in their coho bins, to my suprise was atleast 4 cutthroat of all spectacular size ranging from 18 to 22 inches.....I was in disbelief! Though when they use sein nets with such tiny mesh I suppose anything over 12in can get caught.....