Wild Steelhead Harvest Moratorium

[rich_simms]

OLYMPIA - The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission today adopted new sportfishing rules for the 2004-05 season that include a two-year moratorium on retaining any wild steelhead caught in state waters.

The moratorium, adopted on a 5-3 vote, will require anglers to release any steelhead caught from April 1, 2004 to March 31, 2006 that is not marked as a hatchery fish by a missing adipose fin and a healed scar.

Drawing from a list of 463 proposed changes - 336 of them submitted by the public - the commission also adopted new handling requirements for releasing salmon and steelhead that cannot be retained, additional protection for Columbia River sturgeon and fixed starting dates for recreational crab fishing.

Commissioners also declined to take action on several proposals, including one to ban treble hooks in saltwater fisheries and another to prohibit the use of motorized vessels on the Satsop and Wynoochee Rivers.

Commissioner R.P. Van Gytenbeek of Seattle initiated the discussion about requiring the release of wild steelhead by calling for a permanent ban on wild steelhead retention. When that motion failed, the commission considered and rejected the idea of a six-year moratorium before scaling it back to two years.

"In this case, I think a half a loaf is better than no loaf at all," Van Gytenbeek said. "A lot of people in this state are concerned about the decline of our wild steelhead stocks and I think a moratorium gets us started down the right path."

Commission Chair Will Roehl of Bellingham did not share that view, noting that the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) is currently working on a new comprehensive plan for steelhead management, tailored to specific stocks.

"I can't support banning retention of wild steelhead on rivers where stocks are healthy and returns are strong," Roehl said. "I don't think this broad-brush action is warranted, but that appears to be the will of commission."

When releasing steelhead or salmon that cannot be retained under state law, anglers will have to follow new handling procedures approved today by the commission. Measures adopted by the commission prohibit completely removing salmon or steelhead caught in lakes or streams from the water or pulling them into a boat in Puget Sound prior to release.

To provide greater protection for Columbia River sturgeon, the commission extended the closed area below Bonneville Dam approximately two miles downstream to Marker 85 from May 1 to July 31. All sturgeon fishing - whether from a boat or from the bank - will be prohibited in the expanded closure area, where the fish tend to congregate.

In addition, the annual harvest of sturgeon for personal use was reduced from 10 fish to five statewide, and sturgeon seasons recently developed in conjunction with Oregon were adopted as permanent rules for the 2004-05 season.

Recreational crabbers, meanwhile, can expect greater certainty in the timing of their seasons in the coming year. For the first time since 2000, the commission set opening dates for each marine area rather than relying on tests to determine when the crab have finished their molt.

Improved data on molting periods provided by WDFW allowed the commission to set opening dates this year for crab fisheries in all 13 marine areas of Puget Sound and the Washington coast, Roehl said.

"We're pleased that we've reached this point," Roehl said. "Now we have the data we need to protect the resource, while allowing people to plan their vacations."

In other matters the commission:

· Clarified rules prohibiting snagging, making it illegal to hook and retain a fish (other than forage fish) to the rear of its gill plate.
· Adopted a three-month catch-and-release fishery for trout and other gamefish on the Cedar River in King County.
· Adopted permanent regulations banning retention of canary rockfish and prohibited spearfishing for any species of rockfish.
· Set new daily hours (9 .m. to 1 p.m. on days open to shrimp fishing) for designated Puget Sound shrimp districts such as Port Angeles Harbor and Discovery bay. It also extended the Port Townsend Shrimp District north of the Port Townsend ship canal to include Kilisut Harbor.
· Extended the Octopus Hole Conservation Area in Hood Canal to include the adjacent tidelands.
· Set new hours for harvesting clams and oysters on a number of beaches and set new bag limits and seasons for rivers and lakes throughout the state.

These and other measures adopted by the commission will appear in WDFW's 2004-05 Sport Fishing Rules pamphlet.

[sinktip]

A toast to Rich, Dick, Jack, Richard, Jeff, Bob, Peter, Todd, Nate, Les and the other WSC members who made this happen.

[sinktip]

I appreciate your kind words Crash but what not everyone knows, this fall I took a stand against pushing for this action. I felt it an unwinnable battle that would cost the WSC dearly in political capital. I was flat out wrong and the victory won yesterday is the work of those mentioned above. I may bask in the glow of it but I don't deserve any of the credit.

Credit also goes out to TU, Clark-Skamania Flyfishers, The Oly. Pen. Guides association and countless other individuals and organizations that stood up for fish. My thanks to each of you.

Duggan

[flytyer]

Rich et al,

Thanks for getting this through, it is a good day for the fish. Sometimes the good guys actually win.

[Josey]

Thanks for pushing this through.

A lot of our streams on the North Strait have severely dwindling steelhead and wild salmon. F&W's escapment goals are typically 100 wild steelhead.

Many streams have extirpated or nearly extirpated stocks. Chum are just about gone from many major streams. Native chinook are nearly gone if not gone from even such major rivers as the Pysht.

It's going to take a lot more actions like the one just passed to make a difference.

[rich_simms]

Thanks for the words Josey! Do us a favor and tell the mayor and others in Forks that they are going to see an upswelling of business in the future because "they will come"!

[Josey]

Thanks Rich:

Western Clallam and Jefferson Counties are not hotbeds of stewardship. There have been two pro-release letters to the editor (Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles), both well written and both from out of town.

Some locals have petitions going to repeal the madatory release regulations, and our local state politicians (Buck and Hargrove)never take the side of salmon.

Most of the problem, I think, is lack of understanding. I see fishermen stomping through redds, yanking hooks out, throwing jacks back in the salmonberries so as to cleanse the gene pool of stunted fish.

I would go even further than the pro-release regs. I'd like to see no fishing on small streams with runs under 1,000 fish and no baited hooks anywhere because of the increased mortality. I think redds should also be protected.

And I think fishermen are the only ones who can get this message out. --Josey

[Angela]

I'm sorry but I don't agree with any of you that the Wild Steelhead Harvest Moratorium is a good thing.

I don't know why you think it is great to take the right away to EAT a steelhead from other accomplish anglers. I catch over 100 steelhead or more a year personally and put them all back even some hatchery fish. I practice this, my friends practice this and most fishermen I'm aquainted with practice this. There are very few people that EAT steelhead anymore because we would like them to continue on in all their natural glory blah blah blah and they taste like sawdust anyways.

I would like to keep my right to harvest a fish if I kill it accidentally. I would like to have my right to choose.

What I find funny with this Moratorium Ruling and the most ridiculous rule ever to be pass "The I can't take a fish out of the water rule" is how selfish you all are.

You want to save the fish, you want to make sure no one touches them and you don't want anyone especially to eat them yet you want to stick hooks in them and drag them to your feet.

If you believe that the steelhead is that delicate of a creature and that endangered then you shouldn't fish for them at all. You should try to get the state to close the rivers to fishing for them.

You have "bastardized" the sport of fishing to something so completely ridiculous that it isn't recognizable anymore. Go anywhere in the country and tell them about our steelhead fishing and see what they say.

"How are you going to remove the hooks from the fish if you can't take it out of the water?"
"Why would you fish if you can't eat them?"

The best part is that you didn't think of the old people that plunk on the side of the river. Now old people that can barely walk have to risk their hips on slippery rocks to remove hooks.

Children have to enter the river and maybe fall in and drown.

And what about the handicapped?

Sure you think that the "magical dehooker device" can solve all these problems but you know it can't.

Thanks to groups like yours, you've given the Commercial Sports Industry an excuse to extend charter season for twice as long so they can wade through twice as many wild fish to get their hatchery quota thus killing innocent wild fish because

Catch and Release is the answer to everything.

Sorry it isn't and if you were truly for the rights of the "Wild Steelhead" you would get the fishery shut down completely.

[Josey]

Hey Angela:

I think I know exactly how you feel, now only because you stated your views clearly but because so many fishermen feel the same way, especially Oly Pen locals.

For the record, and because I agree with some of your points, I don't fish. And I and my neighbors -- all of whom are fishermen and none, other than me, are environmentalists -- did fight to get our stream closed.

We were probably too late. The chinook are extirpated. The chum are extirpated. The coho are just hanging on. The steelhead are down to about 50 fish and declining.

Please look at the data: The chum in Salt Creek are gone. The chum and wild steelhead in the Lyre are a wreck, mostly because F&W dumps 40,000 steelhead smolts on them every year. The Pysht is extirpated or nearly extirpated of native chinook. The Western Strait chum is in worse shape than the listed summer run chum in any of its Puget Sound regions.

Think the coast is better? Bull trout are barely hanging on. The Quillayute has more hatchery coho than wild coho. The sickly small rivers of WRIA 19 (300 square miles total) have more wild coho than the Hoh (300 square miles) and the Quillayute (800+ square miles) combined.

We have no healthy wild-fish rivers. Only relatively healthy rivers.

If fishermen don't take the lead now, we'll go the way of European salmon and Atlantic salmon.

Maybe the release regs are not perfect and certainly not enough, but they are a wake-up call that wild salmon are in trouble.

[marketic]

It’s all about the Politics of Religion. It’s all about My God is better then your God. And that's why it's opened such a bitter wound.

A selective God. I'm reminded of an interview that was rumored to have taken place with the owner of a fleet of whaling ships back in the 1960’s. It turned out that Mr. ______ not only owned the largest commercial whaling fleet in Japan but was also an avid birder who gave generously to aviaries all over the world. He was particularly fond of sparrows.

During the interview he was asked how he could possibly rationalize the asymmetry between the havoc he wreaked on the high seas with his whaling fleet and his deep love of birds. “It is simple,” replied the whaling magnate sitting back in his chair. “I stroke the sparrow with one hand. With the other hand I shaft the whale.”

It is amusing to me that one of the more voluble proponents of the Olympic Peninsula Wild Steelhead Catch & Release commonly makes reference on his website to the wild Chinook salmon that he kills for his clients as “groceries”. He makes this comment without the least hint of irony. For me it calls to mind the way "gook" was used during the Vietnam War. Same lack of irony back then, too. It was just a descriptive noun and everyone understood what was being referred to.

But what's intriguing is that in the next breath he will wax into catatonic euphoria about the genetic miracle of Wild Steelhead, and how we must go to the Headwaters and prostrate ourselves at the holy spawning gravel of this magnificent fish, but after he and his buds have had an opportunity to fish over that gravel with diving plugs and pink plastic worms.

I once had a University professor tell me in all seriousness that he was madly in love with weeds. Who the hell did I think I was putting weed killer in my garden when I knew bloody well how much he loved weeds?

And he wanted me to know that he hated grass. It was critical that I took into keen consideration that he abhorred grass. And worse, it bored him. Weeds? He liked the devil-may-care manner in which weeds grew. They were more complex, more elegant, more fit, and if I didn’t start protecting his weeds in MY garden I could go to hell.

It seems to me there is more going on out on the Olympic Peninsula then just a tug-of-war about the appropriate Management Regime to utilize. It is a story about how each one of us choses to approach a renewable resource that just maybe isn’t renewing itself so fast any more. And maybe we have attracted so many user groups to this resource with our endless blather and blatantly promotional websites that we are loving it to death and don't quite know how to quietly just leave it alone.

Whatever is going on out there, there is one point that is not lost on me: the louder the drum is beat about how the wild Olympic Peninsula steelhead is in such dire straits, the more ridiculous and egregious drummers like you and me will look chasing the last remaining fish with our diving plugs and pink plastic worms and buggy looking flies.

If I was a card-carrying GREEN I would be rubbing my flippers together in absolute glee after listening to the “STORY” (the HOOK?) that the Catch & Release proponents (especially the commercial guides!!) have told so far to justify their reasons for prosecuting a strictly “Catch and Release” fishery on the Olympic Peninsula's indigenous steelhead.

So, the ship is sinking but you want to reserve the deck chairs for you and your paying clients? Or maybe this is really just an allocation issue -- you want those who currently harvest these fish to get none so you can have more? Sounds like a zero sum game to me. They get zero and you get the sum. But fish are groceries, right? They come from Safeway. Only steelhead come from Olympic Peninsula rivers and they must be protected.

There is also a seamy side to all of this. One of the shrillest promulgators of this Catch and Release Religion has garishly alluded to how much fun he would have in court “suing the pants off a number of establishments that seemed to think these fisheries could never cease to be healthy”.

If I was a fishery manager and I caught wind of a commercial guide making a comment like that on a public website, I’d be straining my eyes to see not only where this C&R train was going but how bad the wreck is going to be when it gets there.

Then I’d look over my shoulder and think long and hard about what some environmental groups have already done to other Stewards of the Resource such as National Marine Fisheries Service. NMFS made some public policy (fishery) related decisions very recently and what happened? They got their pants sued off. Once that KABUKI dance sunk into my head I might be thinking about alternate management regimes besides C&R and C&K. Like shut the thing down completely if the resource is really in such bad shape.

Why wouldn’t I? The Ministry of Water, Air and Land Protection just took that exact same course of action north of the border. With the stroke of a pen they shut down multiple rivers (prime-time seasonal closures), indicating these closures would be in effect "until further notice".

Same set of circumstances. Pesky indigenous tribes with strong political clout gill netting anadromous stocks in fresh water. Same fuzzy data and even fuzzier data extrapolations collected by (and interpreted by) under-funded governmental agencies. And best of all-- no troublesome sports fishing guides clawing their breasts about the economic impacts on their business; no commercial guides posting sinister insinuations about legal reprisals on websites if they don’t get their way with the fish (i.e. be allowed to exercize their inaliable right to make a living off a publicly owned resource, no matter how weak or strong the anadromous inventory).

But remember, the resource is going to hell in a hand-basket; you said so yourself. So I’ll either get it wrong for supporting Catch and Release once it becomes abundantly clear in the not-so-distant future that true to the beating drums, at least SOME of the stocks of Olympic Peninsula indigenous steelhead are indeed significantly depressed “compared to historical levels”. And as such it’s clear they require protection. Not to shut down the fishery would be at best Bad Public Policy, at worst a recipe for a lawsuit.

And if I don’t get it wrong with C&R I’ll almost certainly get it wrong by continuing to manage the fishery under status quo (Selective Kill), especially when it becomes abundantly clear that Selective Kill is also not prudent because the existing stock won't support it. I mean it’s obvious. Look at the graphs the C&R promulgators have been posting on their websites, the extrapolations they’ve been making-- a clear downward trend of returning spawners compared to historical levels.

To paraphrase an ancient Chinese proverb: beware of what you wish for.

And another proverb for the poor Indigenous Steelhead, the one who has a different User Group with a different set of motives pawing at each of its tired fins:

May you spawn in less interesting times.

[Angela]

Josey, please don't get me started on the Lyre and Physt. I am advising vehemently about closing these rivers down for three years or more to save their wild stocks. Not only have the hatcheries mess them up but the media rags that have been coming out year after year about fishing them have almost destroyed them.

ie Tony Dunnigton's "How to fish small streams". I about had a heart attack. I wonder how the guy sleeps at night.

Catch and release is a wonderful thing and does work BUT is now being misused by the Commercial Charters and must now not be made as an "Extremist Weapon."

In all environmental causes be it save a tree, save a bird blah blah blah Once you get extremist Nazis making it so that you can't "Walk on the roots of the old growth" so now no one can see the beauty of such trees because they aren't allowed to go near them, then it works against the cause. Why would you save a tree that you've never seen or touched?

How are you going to get people involved in fishing when they can't even take the things out of the water?

If another "Ban Nets Initiative" comes out the general public will not vote for it. Why? Because why would the public even care when they can't take their little kids fishing because it's such a pain in the arse?

The problem with extemists and liberals is that they want to babysit the stupid. They make us wear seat belts and bicycle helmets and now we can't touch a fish.

Most of us aren't stupid just a few and I think the fish stocks are healthy enough and the fish are tough enough to handle the mishandlings of the idiots. Plus, the travesties you witness are NEAR AND AROUND FISH HATCHERIES. Not anywhere near where the real fishermen and the real wild fish are. People that are stupid enough to mishandle the fish can't find such places.

As for the Oly Pen native steelhead stocks, again the trend in killing fish is fading away and it really isn't such a slaughter. You have some locals out there that catch hundreds of steelhead yet only take two to five a year. They mostly put them back (rooster theory) and do you know why?

Because if the fish procreate then the whole town of Forks benefits from tourism. They just don't want to scare the tourists off because of the above.

If you're a fly fisherman from New York City and you find out that the fish are in so much trouble that you can't even harvest them you're gonna go bone fishing down in Florida instead.

BTW Some rivers are getting healthy wild runs back of salmon but I can't be sure because I have to see it happen for a few years. Remember, the issues that are occuring now are due to things happening out in the ocean not on the end of our lines.

[Josey]

Hey Marketic and Angela:

You guys make excellent points. Marketic you write so well and so philosophically that you had me running for my Sun Tzu.

And Angela it's nice to know a fisher smart enough and independently minded enough to appreciate the travesty and tragedy of the Lyre.

I don't fish because of the points you both made, plus a few of my own. Nonetheless, I think that we can restore our steelhead and other salmon runs without totally stopping fishing on all rivers. I appreciate the Wild Steelhead Coalition's position because it is a courageous stand for stewardhip.

Yes, catch and release can be a bad thing, because a C&R fish often die or fail to spawn or fail as kelt. A timber company executive at a recent watershed meeting told about the hundreds or thousands of dead salmon piled up on the beaches around Pillar Point, near the mouth of the Pysht. Those were C&R fish.

A charter operator stood up and said the stewards in his group have been trying to get F&W to stop allowing the cherry picking fishing tactics that greatly increases C&R mortality.

F&W didn't respond because most fishermen want to cherry pick. F&W has almost no fish-patrol officers, especially on smaller rivers, because most fishermen don't want enforcement.

So when the Wild Steelhead Coalition actually gets a stewardship response from F&W, it shifts the paradigm and the dialogue. And the public, which knows virtually nothing about the true state of salmon and the causes of their demise, for the first time sees fishermen standing up and saying we have a problem.

Up to now, fishermen -- as a group -- have been saying there is no problem, other than too much protection. Now the public hears from fishermen that there is too little protection.

For years F&W has been promoting the virtues of hatchery fish, even running propaganda programs for school kids who are given their own little salmon juvenile to release. Now Washington Trout is standing up and making destructive hatchery programs an issue.

The public does not believe environmentalists, because we environmentalists overwhelm them with issues. But when fishermen stand up and say we need to save our salmon, we have, at last, an opportunity to solve the problem and address all of the other issues that Marketic and Angela rightly point out.