[quote=stlhdr1 Then the sport anglers become the bad guys with their 8-10% mortality rate with hook and line? [/quote]

Bulls Eye.

You already see SalmonforAll's Jim Wells waving that argument in the above article.

CCA is coming at this as strictly a "conservation issue". And there DEFINITELY are conservation benefits to eliminating that nets that I'm not going to enumerate again. But at the same time, this initiative IGNOREs the "social policy" aspect of this war on the Columbia.

It is the "social policy" , not biology, that is the root of Anglers-versus-Gillnetters.

That "social policy" goes to the question of allocating harvest between the sectors. It was those precisely those fights over allocation in Salem and Olympia that CCA founded its local organizing on.

Suddenly, CCA_OR has done an about-face. Not a word now about the social policy impacts of increasing commercial fishing's competition with sport anglers. Now GRC members say - 'we don't do allocations'.

While "banning gillnets" sounds great (I'm for it) I believe the CCA-OR rank and file will be immensely dispointed when they learn that eliminating gillnets in favor of 'alternative methods' on the mainstem actually increases commercial harvest. That selective methods, don't settle the battle but instead strengthens the commercials' claim to a larger share of the available harvest due to their impacts being less than sports fishers.

(For spring chinook, don't overlook the catch-balance limits with the Tribes, capping the sport/commercial harvest of those fish. We cannot increase the total sport/commercial harvest -- just shift the percentages between them)

At our initial CCA chapter meetings, when we discussed 'getting rid of the nets', us anglers heard - more fishing opportunity for US. It didn't really matter HOW the commercials were fishing, just that they are taking WAAAAYYY too many fish.

There's better ways to do this....