The NOAA Fisheries Service said Wednesday that it will accept a petition from the Cowlitz Indian Tribe to list smelt populations in Oregon, Washington and California for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
The commercial harvest was up to 6 million pounds with an average of 2 million pounds until 1993. No tallies were kept for the sports dippers.The harvest by the commercials bottomed out at 200 pounds in 2005. The subsequent years have seen minor rebounding but nothing significant.
Cowlitz tribal chairman John Barnett puts the blame on the dams on the Cowlitz, "the sediment dredging on the Toutle River in response to the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens and the dams on the Cowlitz River.If the Cowlitz was allowed to flow like a natural river, all the sediment the Army Corps of Engineers is spending millions to dredge would be naturally cleaned out."
Tacoma Power officials who oversee the Mayfield and Mossyrock dams in East Lewis County , said river flow studies requested by Barnett were done in the late 1990's ,and found no connection. "There was no statisical relationship found between flows on the Cowlitz River and the abundance of smelt.",said Mark La Riviere,senior fisheries biologist with the utility.
Of note is the fact that NOAA rejected a similar petition filed by Sam Wright (Olympia) a retired state fish biologist in 1999.The reasons for this decline of the petition are not given.Although his petition did bring about the new,smaller sports limits and number of days to dip. It did not state any changes in the amount allowed to be taken commercially,SURPRISE!
A NOAA proposal could come by fall, followed by a year of peer review,public comment and public hearings.

Sounds like we may have another barn to rent out now that the door will be closed after the horse is gone. I wonder how much time, money and pressure will be put on NOAA by the commercial lobbyists on this one?

Thats Tacoma Power for ya:

"There was no statisical relationship found between flows on the Cowlitz River and the abundance of smelt."

Thats like saying "River?? Smelt dont need no stinkin' river!"

I thought the same thing,when you rely on the fox to count the chickens you will never get an accurate answer. I just wish I knew how to set up a deal between the Japanese markets and the tribes to harvest a small , managable portion (say 25%) of the seals and sea lions in the Columbia. I was talking about this to some other fishermen the other day . They said it would not work because of them being protected, but I said that wasn't stopping them from taking protected steelhead in nets.

And you're basing this on what?

I fail to see by the article posted by Aunty M how the smelt were "hammered" by the ocean commercials. The by catch numbers in the shrimp nettery dropped off, but the entire fishery was in sharp decline. To lay no blame on the in-river netters(commercials) is the same as saying the tribal netters are not doing any damage to the OP steelhead runs because they are "only' taking their 1/2 of the allowable harvest. Why do they continue to allow ANY commercial netting of the smelt run in the rivers when it is in such a rapid decline. To absolve Tacoma Power of any blame for any of the fish declines in the Cowlitz system is also very wrong in my opinion as one who fished the system pre-dams and knows well what it was like back then.
I do not agree with Mr. Barnett on one point, and that is the theory about the river cleaning itself out in subsequent years after the eruption. There was such a massive amount of silt and debris that if something had not been done to help with the flow, we would be seeing a very different Cowlitz River flow today.

Thank you I will. I really don't care about the Sandy river or any other river. My posting was about the Cowlitz run and the Tribal involvment in trying to restore it before it is too late.Any time they do a "study" to prove it has nothing to do with thier dams I get suspicious. Like I said , I grew up on the Cowlitz system and you would never believe the amount of spring,summer and fall chinook in the rivers including the Cispus and Cowlitz above Packwood or the giant runs of steelhead and coho in the Tilton that they destroyed by not putting in fish ladders.Go ahead and stick up for them, it makes no difference to me. It has been even more down hill when some genious came up with the idea that by having a huge run of hatchery coho the total of all runs could be divided out to meet the escapement goals they agreed to in the licensing process. I wish I had kept some of the old articles that supported this fact. Now I'm just another old idiot who has a grudge with them. Anything that has to do with water levels,flows and fish runs has to be negotiated with them to get them to meet the goals they agreed to years ago. I went to a meeting here in Chehalis many years ago when there was talk of letting the commercials net the lower river. Luckily it was met with much resistance and failed. I asked a representative of Tacoma Power if we would have to take them to court to get them to live up to the goals and was told point blank "you better have a lot of money because we do". I have been against them ever since and always will be as long as the dams are in the river.

Look, the oceans are being pounded by factory trawlers which are scraping the ocean clean from floor to surface, in gigantic swaths. Literally. It's the marine version of slash & burn clear cutting and it's going to drive us and a lot else to extinction if it isn't stopped.

Dams and nets HAVE to go. It's not about dollars and cents, it's about survival.

Go ahead and call me a doomsayer, but I'm only quoting what Jaques Couteau knew 10 years ago.

So artifically regulating the flows in the river where the smelt are spawning would have nothing to do with it...

Nor the fact that the smelt require a certain temperature range before they enter a river to spawn. I wonder how much colder the Cowlitz is now that the water comes off the bottom of a very deep lake? I also wonder if the water is of a different smell/taste to them than when it just flushed down from the snow melt instead of sitting for who knows how long gathering who knows what?

i'm no expert on temperature, but the cowlitz is colder than hell even in 100* august heat...