Here we are on the eve of our first native steelhead runs, which got me thinking yesterday about how many fish we are likely to see this season compared to last. I don't know how the powers that be are going to engineer the realocation of 4/5 of our historical sport harvest on the OP, but here are a couple of senarios.

They could base their numbers on punch card returns. Worse yet, they could assume an annual 5 fish harvest based on number of punch cards sold. The bottom line is the native gill nets will be in more days a week for a longer season to capture these fish, which means less fish upstream. We would have been better off promoting the CNR ethic among our ranks and leaving the law out of it.

It will be interesting to see what happens.