do you think a good first step would be to get ahold of some people and design a weir to put in to keep the hatchery fish out ?

snip

The Chum issue is not about the desire to catch them but the desire for them to be protected so that they can do the things that they do to help the other species thrive.

Chum mass spawn in low gradient streams and rivers, they clean gravels and deposit a great deal of marine derived nutrients for the other salmon species to thrive on. Their own offspring will outmigrate at emergence from the gravel and move to the estuary, this means that they have little impact on what food is available for other salmon and steelhead that stay in the river for multiple years specifically Coho, Steelhead and Spring Chinook all species that have a very high demand by sport fishermen and the commercial market.

I hope that helps educate you about why we need to protect Chum it is not so we can catch more it is so that they can reach the gravel and spawn making things better for the whole basin.

Sounds like a selective fishery, sounds good to me.

sorry but a selective fishery can never be as good as a weir.

A portion of the fish from the hatchery will be released in their natal streams with hopes to bolster some areas that are underutilized and under-escapment. Remote site incubators will also be placed througout the upper watershed to help with Chum rebuilding populations that are either gone or have very very small returns of adults.

There are now two opposing recommendations on the use of hatcheries to rebuild wild salmonid populations. Congress recently funded a hatchery review by the Hatchery Scientific Review Group (HSRG) that has recommended many important hatchery modifications to improve their operations and reduce their impact on wild salmon and steelhead. However, the HSRG has recommended an untested premise. By including wild fish in the hatchery brood stock and limiting the number of hatchery fish that spawn naturally with wild fish this so-called integrated hatchery concept can be used not only to protect the wild population, but increase its size.

Untested?