Wild fish, at least in urban areas will never, I repeat never, see their glory days. It's done, finished, gone forever. Trying to do so is an exercise in futility. . Therefore, bring on the brats.

Groups like WT are trying to help the wild fish and they are willing to do it at any expense. Even thier own.

Most of us only care about the wild fish because we like to catch them.

WT cares about the wild fish because their sole esxistance and health comes first and their oportunity to angle for them is second.

This is why the two groups will never agree on hatcheries.

What is most important to you is fishing and catching you would rather catch hatchery fish than not being able to fish at all to save the wild ones.

What is most important to me is the fish and then comes my oportunity after I know the fish are safe.

That Avatar shows you are a little hypocritical I think..If you , like WT, ONLY cared about wild fish you would totally leave them alone and not drag them out of the water to have your picture taken with them. Get real man

Yep Typical,

Bring on the pot shots.

Gotta discredit me dont ya.

Yep im a hipocrit I drug that fish up on the bank rolled it in the sand then I rinsed it off for the picture.

After the photo I dropped kicked it back into the river, it floated upside down after that but atleat I let it go.

Oh I was using bait and barbed hooks in CnR waters too. Who cares about the stupid rules.

Rich , all pot shots aside, I am only trying to point out that fisheries management is not a simple black and white issue. You aren't right and the rest of the world is wrong. You aren't all wrong either. Just because you fish rivers and catch and release fish doesn't make you some kind of fish God or saint...You are fishing your way and that is great.

By the way once you and Ramon save all those wild fish by closing down all the hatcheries what are your plans for them? Would you at some point consider them harvestable? By whom? In what quantity? Or are we talking about preserving your way of fishing and no one else's? I honestly still cannot figure out your end game strategy. Do you have one?

Grandpa

You are getting smarter with each day of your age!

Rich just doesn't get it, and most likly will probably never "get it"!


Cowlitzfisherman

I agree with you. I'm guessing that WT has some biologisits working on their side. Like you point out, why would their agenda be to wipe out the very thing that they're advocationg?

The answer is all of the above. In some watersheds it is habitat; in some commercial overharvest; in some it is hydro. But it is a fact we will NEVER bring back the wild fish without habitat improvments. And don't be fooled by the fact that you think the rivers you see are fine spawning habitat. I used to think the Tolt was perfect habitat until I saw a report that there were many many obstacles to upper tributaries, where the steelhead typically spawn, including bad culverts and excessive braiding due to poor looging practices.

In other cases the damage may not be visable to the untrained eye. I have a lot on the Tahuya River. We used to have a tiny seasonal stream thet crossed the property. Hundreds, if not thousands, of tiiny coho used that tiny stream every year. The kids used to love watching them. A development across thr road diverted the stream into a ditch. No more habitat. No more coho. That story has been repeated thousands of times in Puget Sound area.

It is easy to balme gillnetters, and I have NO love for them either, but fish will not make a comeback unless they can spawn and then have a good environment to live in.
.

The problem you people have with WT and other such groups is really just that your problem.

You need to understand that theese groups care so deeply about the resource and have such passion for our wild salminoid stocks that they are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice which is to sacrifice their oportunity to enjoy these fish by fishing for them.

Instead they put there time and effort and money into saving these fish so that the people of the future will know what it is to have wild salmon and steelhead in our waters.

99% percent of the people in these orginizations are fisherman.

These people know what needs to be done, they have accepted it and they are trying to fix things. They are the only ones who will admitt the truth and who will make sacrifices to try and fix things.

One of the steelhead smolt releases targeted specifically by the WT lawsuit was the LLTKs release of 3700 winter steelhead smolts in the Hamma Hamma River. These smolts were raised from eggs taken from some of the very very few remaining wild fish remaining in that river. A similar program has been carried out by LLTKs on this river to reintroduce fall chinook which were essentially extinct. Several years of effort has led to returns of chinook over the 300 count which we'd not likely see occurring by itself. BTW these fish were derived from composite hatchery stock from the George Adams hatchery. LLTKs steelhead program is a pilot project to try and restore wild winter steelhead to Hood Canal rivers. Anyone familiar with these rivers realizes that for all purposes the wild fish are at extinction levels. Somewhere around 1980 both species crashed as wild spawners. So my question to RichG and other WT supporters is why should this program be stopped or opposed? Here's a group that is trying to restore all salmonid runs on Hood Canal. Can Ramon answer this one? No attack here sir...just a desire for enlightenment?

Those of us who oppose WT as I do and also work to improve the condition of our fish runs and sport fishing opportunities as I do are also very dedicated to restoring fish runs to past glory. We just want to do it with compromise and consensus. We shall see if the new process of hatchery review brings out the best in all of us including WT and OT and NFS. My opinions are biased with the suspicion that WT will not compromise but will ultimately be pushing for hatchery closures on a grand scale. Watch what OT is doing in Oregon for a mirror of what to expect.

auntym, why is there a link on the LLTK`s website to TU ?, they are involved in the lawsuit in oregon

Oh yeah, it's mostly habitat that's the problem, even in areas like Hood Canal that look pretty good but are in reality a series of death traps, particularly for outmigrating juvenile salmon in their critical and sensitive early smolt stage. Here's how it works. Visualize habitat as I-5, a "migration" corridor down which most of our commerce and GNP in the PNW has to travel. Visualize what would happen if you took out the bridge on the Lewis river and replaced it with a rowboat. Well, how well do you think our economy would work if everything we transported had to be unloaded into that rowboat and loaded up into a different truck on the other side to get to your local Walmart? Do you think there might be shortages? Prices might go up? People might starve or be unable to maintain their shelter? Get to their job? Hey, it's just a hundred yards of pavement over 200 miles of highway, nobody should miss that much, right? Well, this is exactly what happens to a juvenile salmon when somebody builds a nice big house out on the beach and surrounds it with a bulkhead. Juvenile salmon have to stay in litterally inches of water in intertidal areas, hide in eelgrass at low tide and shoreline vegetation at high tide, or they get eaten by larger fish or diving ducks. They also rely heavily on epibentic organisms - zooplankton that grow in association with the bottom - for food, if they can't find these they don't eat, and these don't grow when the bottom has been replaced with a house. Hey, it's only a few hundred little 100 foot houses on all these miles of shoreline, that can't hurt much, right? Wrong. Habitat is a continueum, just like I-5, remove a piece that allows fish to get safely down it, and that causes them to expend energy at a critical time to get around it, and you kill their commerce just like removing 100 yards of I-5 kills ours. It's Habitat, it's the hardest problem to tackle, and losing it is going to kill the fish first and us next. <img border="0" alt="[wall]" title="" src="graemlins/wall.gif" />

Peoples selfish attitudes... Thats the biggest obstacle

Hmmmm Spawnout the Hood Canal habitat problems you may be alluding to such as the HWY 101 causeways were built well before the wild stock crashes that occurred just after 1980. Before that the stocks were near historical levels pretty much except for the Skokomish. I'll grant you the idea that allowing the rivers channels to spred at their entrance to the estuary may help.....but on the other hand won't the predator population currently occupying the river mouths just expand. I have a picture of the Dosewallips estuary that is about 80 years old....the river channel is exactly where it is today. No highway.....go figure? Sorry I just can't buy into spending 10's of millions of dollars on engineering salmon restoration without taking a real look at the actual causative factors that caused the crash originally. $500 million per year for such efforts and what do we have to show for it? Anyone ever hear of the Tennesee Valley Authority and Army Corps of Engineers......looks to me like some consultants and engineering companies are the only ones profitting.

Aunty nope those fish came from LLTK....just ask Joe. They are also doing the same on several other Canal rivers.

Rob,
Isnt everyone just a bit selfish? Lets face we all look out for #1. This is a fishing board, people who post here like to fish. If something threatens (WT) their right (or priviledge as some call it) to fish, you've got to expect some backlash. Just because I or anyone else for that matter want to continue to do something they love doesn't make them selfish. I never take more than I need, I dont poach, I release wild steelies and encourage others to do the same. All I ask is that I have the OPPURTUNITY to do something that is a HUGE part of my life. WT threating to close hatcheries and/or divert funds from them definately limits the options I have. I seriously doubt that most "anti-WT" folks could care less about wild fish, probably just the opposite.

RL

You could say the same about P.E.T.A , OR A.L.F. Washington Trout seems to have alot in common with those enviromental groups.
The fishermen supporting WT are the ones with the blinders on! If you really think closing hatcheries is going to stop commercial and tribal harvest your high on P.C.P! It will stop sportsfishing and by Washington trouts actions that seems to be there agenda!
Use your brain dude, no hatcheries = 100% native fish harvest Duh.

If Washington trout had the fishes best interest on there agenda they would push for more selective fishery regulations, better run hatcheries, and banning all nets. Am I willing to hang up my fishing rods? hell no! I am a fisherman dammit not a bunny hugger. Am I willing to make some sacrifices? Yes, I think we all have already done that through increasing regulations and for instance thanks to commercial overharvest such as 39% over qouta by the indians on the Columbia cutting our season short!
Am I willing to make more sacrifices? YES. But I will not suffer in vain! Come up with a plan that works and I will support it 100%

After all having fish is in everybodys best interest isnt it?

Anyone that thinks the cause of salmon declines in Washington is anything but habitat related, must not understand what a river around hear looked like 200+ years ago.

Most people seemt to think as long as the fish can reach it, the gravel is the only thing that matters habitat wise. The gravel is just the beginning. Eggs spend what, 3 months in the gravel. Chinook spend up to 2 years in the stream. Its the rearing habitat that is gone. Why do you think the pinks and chums are doing so well relatively speaking? PS had an alltime record number of wild returning pinks last cycle. They go out to sea right after they hatch. All they need is good gravel. Chinook, steelhead, and coho fry need a place to live-- for years.

Imagine a stream filled with oldgrowth logs and rootwads, unchannelized, with an unfilled estuary. Just as an example the skagit had an oldgrowth log jam hundreds of feet high 10+ miles long and as wide as the river. The entire river went under it. You think that might have served as a bit of smolt rearing habitiat. The entire skagit valley was a series of sloughs and channels, all places to rear fish.

We won't even talk about the columbia.

There may be a few specific rivers that have been overfished, but if the habitat is intact fish will recover in a very few fish generations. Its the habitat that is key.

Anyone that thinks otherwise is just wishing it was as easy as stopping the netting. Don't get me wrong, that would help, but the fish won't come back like the days of yore without drastic improvements in habitat.

My $0.02

Why does everything have to be about WT??? I certainly didn't mention it!!

If we cannot learn to not be selfish then our fish are doomed and there is nothing we can do to save them NOTHING!

1. WE HAVE TO STOP KILLING THEM SO PEOPLE CAN SELFISHLY EAT THEM (HARVEST)

2. WE HAVE TO STOP DESTROYING THEIR HABITAT SO PEOPLE CAN SELFISHLI LIVE WHEREEVER THEY WANT AND HAVE EXACTLY THE JOB THEN WANT. ( DEVELOPING RIPAREIAN AREAS . MINING, LOGGING AND AGGRICULTURE)

3. WE HAVE TO STOP INUNDATING THEM WITH HUGE QUANTITIES OF HATCHERY FISH SO WE CAN SELFISHLY CATCH AND KLILL MORE FISH. (HATCHERIES)

WE CANNOT SAVE THESE FISH UNLESS WE STOP DESTROYING THEM..