Dogfish, you made some good points and a lot of sense in your last two posts. This is a great way for us to come to a meaningful conclusion, maybe someday many of us on this board will be able to get together and hash things out in friendly manner.
In the meantime enjoy the great season we're having and see ya on the water!

Hey Dogfish,

I took another look at that link, it looks complete now, I think it was my browser messing up earlier, some of the text was truncated.

I agree that any future initiative will need to be more compassionate towards the affected parties to have a better chance at passing.

-N.

[ 07-27-2001: Message edited by: StorminN ]

Thanks guys,

That is exactly what I was trying to get across. When we focus on more than just what we want, we will get more support. Andy

I'm elated to see that the "sportsman's" picture of the commercial fisherman has not changed one bit. The sportsmen need to be aware that all commercial fishermen are greedy, watershed destroying trolls who leave a path of unregulated destruction and dead fish in thier oily, garbage enrshounded wakes. The damn commercials are ten times worse than the sportsmen who never ever think about leaving bait cups, miles of discarded fishing line, beer cans, and other very sightly and beautifull heaps of trash for others to enjoy on our rivers, lakes and, estuaries. Sportsmen would never think of yarding a wild fish onto a gravel bar and tearing hooks out just prior to kicking it back into the water to continue it's spawning journey would they? And those thousands of outboards puking oil and gas mix into our coastal and inland waters? Not even a problem for guys so pure and pristine! Can't say any 18 foot Alumaweld with a jet pump ever tore up a redd on a river.
As far as contributions back to the economy, commercials probablly never paid a damn dime into our government coffers. Twenty-eight percent tax brackets amount to chump change as do state licencing fees. These guys are no good all the way around. They don't contribute DICK to any economy, especially Westport's in the summer. The landing fees from millions of pounds of shrimp, crab, and tuna, and oh yeah even a scant few salmon don't have any type of impact on an area that just whines and pants year long for the sportsmen to flock to town and bail them out of thier pitifull existence. Thank God for all of the Seattle/Tacoma residents who save the Grays Harbor/Willapa area every year!
Actually, it would be very interesting to see what would happen if Boeing, PACCAR, and the rest of the major industries in the urban areas would have the rug pulled out from under them for various reasons. Possibly some good ole' voter intitiatives would force them to leave town and see how the recipiants of those actions would feel about not having a viable income for supporting thier families. I bet there wouldn't be hordes of new Powerstrokes towing sleds and Arimas past Montesano every Friday and Sunday.
Look, I agree that conservation is of the utmost importance now. But before everyone jumps on the I-695 bandwagon and hangs the commercials in effigy (some of the more rabid sporties would go for the real thing) why can't you look at the statisics of the last 8-10 years and see that the commercial (non-treaty) fishermen are not the culprits. Have you looked at the amount of actual fishing time commercials recieve now? The Willapa, Grays Harbor,Columbia, and Puget Sound get to fish a tiny fraction of the time (during periods preceeding or after the bulk of any in-question run is not around) that thier impact is minimal on protected fish. The commercials pay taxis and licence fees. They are entitled to a share of the fish just as the sports groups. What, you think you'll catch more fish if the commercial killer nets are all drawn out of the water? The sportsmen's success rate wouldn't bump up enough to notice. If you read your fishing and hunting news they'd tell you in black and white that only a potion of the fish bite (isn't everything Shangle prints the God-given truth?) The commercials don't have the impact that they had in the 70's or 80's. They HAVE NO FISHING TIME! GAWD, give it a rest, look at the time alotted and look at what the sportsmen get as opposed to the commercials. Case in point, the springer fishery in the Columbia last spring resulted in less than the 6000 fish quota set for the commercials in the few days they got to fish. The state shut it off when there was a remote chance of them coming near to or going over the quota...very tightly regulated. But all I could hear in the early season was *****ing and whining about them damn nets are choking off the run. Well, what happened? Weren't Ya'll happy with yer big ole' stringers of fish?!!! What, you want more???? Well, my friends, quit beating a dead horse and figure out how to stop the point of impact fishing IN our rivers. Stop wearing the tread off your Nike's and stop bolstering Bic's bottom line running around getting thousands of signatures to stop them damn gillnetters and their foul ways. Yes, they are the most visible deterrent to saving our salmon. But, ever looked at the cycles of returns over the last 50 years? Ever considered what oceanic conditions might mean to our run's heath. Ever considered what conditions preclude a good outrun of smolt from our rivers? Based on what I've heard on this board and from the mouths of other sports groups( Joe Shangle and the anti-tangle rhetoric) most are way to uninformed to be blathering about the evil ways of todays commercials. Try educating the hordes on how to C&R a wild salmon or stealhead (no, kicking it up on the bank is not correct, nor is putting it in an unnatural position in a dipnet, picking it out by the gills or tail, tearing out the hooks and tossing it back in the crick good for survival, sure didn't see any of that on the lower Columbia last spring), and possibly teaching some of the "sporties" to pick up trash would be a nice touch.
Look, I've been a member of this board for over a year, practice C&R and clean conservation practices (and emphasise them around everyone I fish with) and put the health of the fish runs before all things. Shut the whole damn thing down if we have to! I haven't spoken out much on this issue before. But, I'm tired of the fanatical and ill placed negative energy going into efforts such as 695. It failed because its a crock of crap. And so is everything directed at bombing the commericals off the map. Ever taken time to see what areas have been close off to non-tribal netting during the abbreviated fishing periods???? No consideration is given to the fact that the commercials have put forth many dollars, and years of time into rearing and releasing fish and restoring stream habitat that not only benefit them (increasingly less and less) but benefit the sportsmen who get to catch the salmon produced by those commercial efforts as well. Just remember, when you are sitting at Ray's Boathouse or some swank joint on the Seattle Waterfront and are watching a bunch of gillnetters "rape" the chinook, it shouldn't be the "non-tribal" commercials you are getting pissed at.
I gillnetted for salmon in Puget Sound and the Willapa system in the late 80's, Istill gillnet Bristol Bay Alaska and I crab fish in both Alaska and out of Westport. I'm retooling my life and career (with substantial impact to my family and lifestyle) and most others in the changing world of commercial fishing are also. Yes, partially in response to the negative image we have recieved from unbased propaganda from sportsmen's groups (so yes, you are having an impact if that makes you feel good), partially due to the changing market conditions in the seafood industry (if I were looking to head up an intiative to help protect our wild salmon runs I'd look seriously into our little "triploid" buddies running up the rivers to spawn). I guess what pisses me off is the stuff I hear and read that is totally void of factual statements. I mean, where do you guys get you stats and facts, off a McDonald's monopoly game piece?!! Go to your regional fishies office and get some hard facts before you spout off. Don't rely on the boys at Cooter's Worm Bin to pat you on the back about the survival rate of C&R's wild steelhead and salmon. I've seen the public in action on that one and its not pretty.
There are positive efforts being made on both sides of the ball, we need to erase the line and drop the "HolierThan Thou" attitudes, read the facts, face the realities, cut through the propaganda and figure out what works. I'm for the fish and just plain tired of the crap slinging that doesn't have any merit anymore. Guess I'll have to take it if I want to be a part of this board.

ChuckNDuck, our hearts bleed for you......while some of what you say is true about the sporties, its time to do things differently and quit fishing in the same detrimental ways of old. Remember, I don't really want to completely shut down the commercial boys, there is a place and need for commerce as well as food, but the way we do this can and eventually will be very different in the years to come.

Chuckn'Duck, I have to first agree with you about the shameful practices of some "sportsmen". It's disgusting sometimes. This year, on the salt, I've seen more people mistreating fish they've then released, than I ever have in the past. Some education is definitely in order.
However, you also said, "The sportsmen need to be aware that all commercial fishermen are greedy, watershed destroying trolls who leave a path of unregulated destruction and dead fish in thier oily, garbage enrshounded wakes." I agree, I think all sportsmen, as well as the entire general public, should be aware of this. All commercial fishermen ARE greedy. They DO destroy habitat, especially the trawlers. They DO leave a path of (regulated, but rarely observed) destruction, again, especially the trawlers, who basically clearcut the seafloor. Commercial fishermen do leave a lot of dead fish and other dead sealife behind, they even have a polite term for it, it's called "incidental bycatch". I'm not sure that their wakes are that oily, but I know those big diesels aren't the cleanest engines, either. I wouldn't say they leave behind that much garbage, unless you count all the discarded fishing gear, cut loose for one tangled reason or another.
I'm sure since you've been gillnetting for 15 years or so that you've heard of a gillnetter losing all or part of their net, perhaps this has even happened to you. It's an expensive mistake, but it happens. How do you think a discarded gillnet compares to the "miles of discarded fishing line" you talked about? Do you think that net keeps killing fish?
As far as contributions to the economy, are you talking the past or the present? I'm sure when the business was good, your commercial fishermen friends paid their fair share of taxes, but no more than they would have paid if they were employed in some different, licensed occupation. These days, of all the trollers and gillnetters docked at the Fishermen's Terminal in Seattle, how many do you think paid taxes LAST year? How many of those guys are just using them as a tax writeoff, and waiting for a buyback? How many do you think have actually fished in Puget Sound in the last 5 years?
There have been studies done, (and I wish I had links to them) that prove that each fish caught by a commercial fishermen in this state these days COSTS the taxpayers money, (I think about $2.00) and each fish caught by a sportsmen brings about $5.50 back into the economy, through tourism, fuel, equipment, etc. They did a similar study in BC, the difference being that their Fisheries Department made the decision to go after the sportsmens' bucks, and this is a major reason why they don't have the large commercial troll fishery on the west coast of Vancouver Island any longer, and why they are advertising in all of our magazines: "Come up and fish". We can credit our much better coho returns recently to the lack of that west coast Vancouver Island commercial troll fishery, so I wouldn't say, as you do, that "the sportsmen's success rate wouldn't bump up enough to notice".
The issue for me is not how much fishing time the commercials get now, it's how much they have impacted the resource in the past, and how wasteful their practices are now when they ARE allowed to fish. Why is it that the salmon catch counts in this state peaked in the 1910's and 20's? Do you think all those canneries had anything to do with it? This was long before the big dams, a bit before any major deforestation... habitat was not the issue, harvest was, and the greedy commercial fishermen took what they could.
For every "tightly regulated" commercial fishery, (acually just means "observed") there seems to be some other almost unobserved fishery... how about the thousands of chinook (some say 40,000+) killed & thrown back in 1996 in the San Juan sockeye purse seine fishery? All "incedental bycatch". That's some botched "catch & release", don't you think? I don't think there is any room for this sort of wastefulness with today's fish numbers. You kill 40,000 in the San Juans, and then we wait for 3,000 escapement to return to the Green river. It doesn't make sense. You speak of the bad catch & release practices of the sportsmen, well how good are your commercial buddies at doing it? When that purse seine is pulled, how many of the unwanted fish at the bottom of that purse do you think will make it out alive? How much of the sealife that's hosed off the deck of the trawler after the net's been emptied do you think is going to live? How about those non-targeted salmon you catch in your gillnet? Were they still moving when you threw them back, or were they long dead? Were they bleeding from the gills, or did they never even get put back, but somehow made it into one of the crewmen's coolers? (You may not do it, but don't tell me it doesn't happen.)
If you want to fish commercially in non-wasteful ways, I'll support that. You might not like it, you probably won't make a living at it, but that's how it goes. I visited Newfoundland in 1981, they were still handlining cod in small, inshore boats there then. It was a thriving, fairly sustainable fishery, and had been for four generations. They had a saying there... "fish or get out"... it was the only thing to do there. Those guys worked hard, in harsh weather, just to scrape out a living. I admired them. Just about that time, in the 80's, the big offshore trawlers started up. They came in and, in less than a decade, wiped all the cod off their spawning grounds in deep water. They put the all small inshore guys out of buisiness. There hasn't been a commercial fishery to speak of there since 1994. You want to talk about economic hardship??? Go to Newfoundland.
I don't think anyone is "pulling the rug out" from under the commercials here, They should have seen this coming, it's been a steady decline for decades, if that's not enough time to shift gears and retrain for a new profession, I don't know what to tell you.
One problem I see is that commercial fishermen don't tend to view themselves as a big group... you're a non-tribal gillnetter and crabber, so you don't really equate yourself with the trawlers, longliners, seiners, or even the tribal gillnetters, for that matter. I'm sure you say, "Well, yeah, those trawler-processors are wasteful ships, but I'm not like that". I see all of you as basically the same. You are all doing it for MONEY. Because you are doing it for money, and because of the way you are regulated, you tend to adopt quick, wasteful, and sometimes insanely dangerous practices, that simply aren't neccessary.
So go ahead, keep fighting to get the right to net that last wild salmon (or hatchery, no wait, I forgot, your nets catch both!!), in the end it might just be some Chilean farmer that saves the Northwest's salmon, by stealing your market away.

-N.

[ 07-29-2001: Message edited by: StorminN ]

Howdy chuck'n'duck. I don't believe that I said anything negavtive about the commercials, but actually tried to let folks know what some of your issues were, and still are.

I am happy to see that you have a good grasp of both sides of the issue as you pointed out problems with both commercials and sports fishermen. We both need to work on our images.

That being said, best of luck in the future. Andy

Hey Chuck,

The anti-696 group could have used you to write ads for them. They could have run them along with the "20,000 jobs lost, not one salmon saved" ads.

The three biggest lies ever told in politics:

1 I did NOT have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski.

2 Read my lips, NO NEW TAXES

3 20,000 jobs lost, not one salmon saved.

So who provides a larger positive impact(per fish)on the economy,sporties or commercials?
Who creates a more negative impact on the overall economy and industries effected by an increase in environmental regs to protect over harvested stocks,sports industry or commercial?
You're economic impact argument is great for TV ads where the commercials outspend the sporties and are more interested in the bottomline than the fish,but it's an argument used to BS the general public and not provide any enlightenment to them.
Good luck selling this argument to the sportsman.

[ 07-30-2001: Message edited by: Leadslinger ]

i have yet to meet a commercial fisherman who`s earns 100 percent of his income from netting or trolling for salmon in the state of washington.

StormN.....very well stated, everything I wanted to say and more!