"They were given it with Summer Chinook, and they're above 50% on fall chinook and off the chart on coho...."


Boater, You are aware of course that we just went thru one of the biggest ocean and Buoy 10 coho fisheries in recent years. The gillnetters are still mopping up and the sports have gone home. The gillnetters are lucky to get $1 a pound for silvers now. Do you suppose they will keep on fishing if the price drops below that?

You and Todd make a good team. You want more fish to catch and Todd wants to eliminate hatchery fish. So who gets what?

You may also be aware as I'm sure Todd is that Oregon has a law that guarantees equal access to the fish.
don't know about Washington. Bill Monroe has been hammering this home for years. So you guys really think that the States will allow commercials to catch them all and leave the sports with nothing? This spring on the Columbia was one of the best seasons in years. And it was all above I-5! We still didn't reach impact and left a buffer.

So dream on. CCA is here to stay! And trust me Gary doesn't lose sleep over your opinions!

answer me this, why is the wdfw trying to get the non-tribl gillnetters to go to a method with a low release mortality rate ?

considering the gillnetters are getting about 1/2 of the sports coho esa take i`d say they are going to keep fishing, we didnt use all of our esa coho take, you probly already know that what we dont use goes to them.

I don't want to eliminate hatchery fish...I want the supporters of this ridiculous idea to at least admit that it will do nothing to help wild ESA spring Chinook, and that they are unjustifiably afeard of losing their clouds of hatchery fish without a robust commercial fishery...pretending otherwise is getting tiresome.

Fish on...

Todd

You have seen the light! We (sports) have killed all the Coho we want, and there are still fish to be had. If they kill them with gillnets they also kill Steelhead and wild fish. If they go selective they only kill hatchery. Is that difficult to understand?

I guess to minimize impacts. So is ODFW. Next question?

Gary is not involved in the day to day operation of CCA. He has a business to run. Im happy to burst your bubble. So much for the know it alls.

It wasnt even two years ago, we all heard, ITS THE DAMS. So how is your battle going? Yet, some have time, to complain about people they dont even know, or work with. Some, keep repeating the same rule of 2% assuming the government and the fishing organizations cant reduce the limit of 2% to 1%. Its like car emissions. Reach the goal, raise the bar. They give no weight to the effect that selective harvest has already had on certain tribes. At the same time, acting like two different sets of rules would save any fish. If the commercial fisherman are given 50% of the allocation of hatchery fish, CCA will not fold up and go home. Its not an allocation fight. There are other fish and bottom dwellers to save. But, Im sure the detractors will continue to tell us, how and where CCA will fail. Doing nothing, is failure.

After two years, one of which was spent raising money to hire people to do our work, (which was also complained about)...and after WE saved the commission from one man rule of the entire dept. they are still complaining. Who gets the credit for getting rid of the former Director? Perhaps it came to the governor in a dream... CCA was another voice in DC to remove thousands of ghost nets from Puget Sound. OH! Big deal! Three volunteer members, represented sportsmen through the entire NoF process, all the way to the final meetings in California. Secured a humpy season on the Green River and increased the total amount of fishing season available by more than 10 months.

Rather than preaching about their own SOLUTIONS and PLANS, they continue to degrade some senior citizen, who broke with conventional wisdom and convinced the most successful marine conservation organization to work with US and on our behalf. They are doing everything wrong! Wah! The self proclaimed experts are still crying about not getting their way. They would also be wrong to assume that membership is of the opinion that selective harvest will completely solve the problem. Leadership has spoken of it, to the many members. There will be other battles. Listening to the detractors of the said organization, one might assume the organization is in a stiff legged march into battle with zero research, zero awareness, zero planning and zero credentials. Like its their first picnic. What the detractors fail to remember is the actual chances of banning commercial fishing out of the box, (2007) since it failed twice in the past. That might have been part of the problem, since so many experts said CCA would amount to nothing and FAIL. The possibility of ratcheting up the heat, if results do not improve, are not part of the collective thought process, only failure. No thought of the possibilities, only short comings.

I have to wonder, how a new business owner, active fisherman and officer of a nonprofit group, could delegated so much time, to ridicule membership and leadership of another organization. There is no election. Those who disagree, are free to organize and recruit their own members, raise money, elect officers, form a mission statement and position statements and go about hiring attorneys, lobbyists and various experts to draft legislation to ban nets on the Columbia River and everywhere else in the state.

Perhaps if we made the selective harrassment of wild spawning steelhead illegal in Washington rivers, year around, we might save one extra wild fish and some of you, would have time to ban the nets and tear down the dams. But, I suspect, some of you would rather pound the table harder, expecting different results. We will never know how many people will never join, how many ideas and volunteers will never come forth. Nor will we be able to predict how many problems wont be solved, because of the constant complaining and harrassment of members.

I suspect that a good many very qualified folks wouldn't touch the CCA with a ten foot pole because of the harrassment they receive from often uneducated but very passionate CCA folks...I tend to choose where to throw my support, time, and energy behind those who do what I believe is useful and helpful, and shy away from those who aren't...

I think the CCA was helpful in keeping our Commission structure at least as good as it is, and I appreciate their concern about ghost nets...but to think that ghost nets would never go anywhere without the CCA, or that the CCA "saved" the Commission is self-aggrandizement in the extreme.

There have been individuals and organizations working on getting out ghost nets, and actually getting them out, long before the CCA ever came to the PNW...putting out a position paper supporting their removal and having the guy who actually does it speak at a CCA meeting doesn't all of a sudden turn ghost nets into one of Gary's "wins"...it's just supporting the right thing, like lots of other folks and organizations do.

There were many individuals and organizations...including the CCA...who participated in the debate to keep our Commission structure, and there will be lots more work to do on it in the future, too...I hope the CCA continues to help with that, but leaves the sort of ridiculous arrogance about it that LB brings to the subject at the door, or they'll continue to alienate the very folks who could help them become a first class organization.

Fish on...

Todd

What is arrogant, is to infer that I am keeping you from joining. Nor is anyone else. I challenge you to find one professional in the business, that wont join because of me. That means a real name and a title.

"CCA was another voice in DC to remove thousands of ghost nets from Puget Sound. OH! Big deal!" [one sentence]

Todd Quote-
and I appreciate their concern about ghost nets...but to think that ghost nets would never go anywhere without the CCA,

"There have been individuals and organizations working on getting out ghost nets, and actually getting them out, long before the CCA ever came to the PNW...putting out a position paper supporting their removal and having the guy who actually does it speak at a CCA meeting doesn't all of a sudden turn ghost nets into one of Gary's "wins"...it's just supporting the right thing, like lots of other folks and organizations do. END Todd Quote

It would appear, you dont know about every meeting or application that was written or the letter from NW Straits Initiative, thanking CCA for their support. How could you... If anything, I understated CCA involvement in my original statement. Again, with the cheap shots, Gary is the founder and Washington Chair. Just like Microsoft is more than Bill Gates. However, Gary had reason to smile.

Ive seen the tapes of the legislative hearings. The CCA head count and the CCA speakers add up to a big win. But feel free to link to your or WSC testimony to keep the comission, in case I dosed off. Im dam proud of the results last year and I have the minutes on my cell phone and the emails to show for it. You bitch and denounce whenever it suits you and Im not gonna roll over and shut up. A bunch of 25 dollars experts, did more than you thought we could. Its certainly wasn't your network or membership base that woke up sleeping fishermen and hunters in every county in the state. The calls were 9:1 against the bill. No one in Olympia expected us to win that.

I dont see you telling your customers not to show off your lures. Nothing wrong with being low key, just dont expect anyone to get excited about something you arent able or willing to promote. Asside from fishing gear.

Ya I suppose C & R for wild steelhead was a good idea. But it also didnt keep you from targeting them during spawning season.

I think you need to look outside of your CCA shoebox and see the other thousands of individuals and many other organizations who are working on those subjects, and many more...

Your self-centered tone would be like me saying that no one ever caught a steelhead before I started a company, and that no one has ever caught a steelhead since without my company's lures...

Fish on...

Todd

Todd,

Please, as a personal favor, back off a minute. Of course CCA didn't do it alone. We all know that. But you and I and everyone else also knows that CCA brought one thing to the Legislative issue that no one else did - numbers. And the numbers made a positive impression, and the numbers may have (impossilbe to know) carried the outcome.

There are more than enough legitimate disagreements to go around. Most of the energy spent on those is and continues to be counter-productive. We'll be better off to focus energy on the cummulative strengths of the aggregate of sportfishing organizations. That is the ONLY thing that pays off in moving us closer to our mutual conservation goals.

All this petty bickering aimed at detracting one another's efforts should earn several posters a trip to the woodshed.

Sg

I acknowledge that CCA played a part...what I don't acknowledge is the "never would have happened without the CCA" attitude that seems to pervade LeadBouncer's opinions and posts.

Fish on...

Todd

Sporties have killed all the coho they want? Maybe at Buoy Zooey or in the ocean but what about the folks who fish the rivers upstream of the gillnet fishery?

There are folks who don't own boats, folks who get seasick, and those who just prefer small river fishing. Couple that with a desire/preference not to fish in a mixed stock fishery and they may not see letting the gillnetters "mop up" as a good thing.

a few of us are concerned about that especially if they go to a method with a low release rate that will allow them to take more fish, alot of stuff going on doesn't make sense to me, how bout this one, some puget sound chinook salmon populations have up to 70 percent hatchery fish on the spawning grounds so the brilliant idea is to change all the harvest on them from here to alaska to selective hatchery fish only fisherys to fish that 70 percent down, common sense would tell me that if they do that and i`m fishing for those same hatchery fish at one of the river mouths that there aint going to be to many hatchery fish to fish for, our problem is that we need a big agregate of fish to have good sportfishing and if you take that away sportfishing will suck, we have some real problems that we need to realy think about before we act.

this kinda reinforces that, the state isnt stupid and they know that with the catch sharing agreement with the tribes that there is only one place that the non-tribals can get more hatchery spring chinook and thats from the sports,

(b) Continue to provide opportunities and resources to further develop selective commercial fishing techniques with a goal of reducing mortality of listed fish and increasing access to hatchery fish.

http://wdfw.wa.gov/commission/policies/c3617_attch1.pdf

Todd,

Spot on.......... Best post of the year.......

Keith

Watch out for them hatchbox coho..............

Keith

What has been done or is being done about the Canadian recreational and commercial fishery impact on Salmon returning to the Columbia River that just get hammered on all the way back home?

Just the way it is? Lost cause? Great to be them, sucks to be us?

Rick

thats a whole new problem.

Personally, I think it's the majority of the problem.