The Outdoor Line Forum

Hey Bow,

Thanks for listening to our show, I sincerely appreciate it!
We work pretty hard on the content and I feel it showed today with Dr. Garrett's appearance.

Here's the thing though: It's in this year of low returns that our fisheries struggles come to a head and the Sportsmen and Tribal relationships hit a low point.

There's a heck of a lot of harvest of our Washington-bound salmonids in Alaskan and Canadian waters before they even get within reach of us, so in a very real sense, there is harvest in front of the tribal terminal area fisheries.

In my opinion, the best way to gain opportunity is to produce our way out of this with hatcheries and habitat enhancement. The easiest path to that goal in in cooperation with the tribes.

After this springs acrimonious North of Falcon debacle it's difficult to resist the temptation to paint all the tribes with the same brush. With the Skok's refusal to allow bank access and the Puy's lack of good faith bargaining it's easy to get ticked off. However, there are several tribes -The Tulalips for example, that provide opportunity for sportsmen and do not completely agree with the hard line of the aforementioned peoples.

The bottom line is that the Boldt Decision is the law of the land and will never be overturned so lets move on.

This spring, our Government's de facto interpretation of the Federal Endangered Species Act was to allow tribal gillnetting and not allow any sportfishing whatsoever without the State of Washington obtaining their own lethal take permit of this endangered species namely Puget Sound chinook salmon.

In essence, the tribes have a legal right to fish through their treaties with the US Government.
The citizens of Washington have a privilege to fish within the seasons and catch limits set by WDFW.

The Feds will always side with the tribes and if we want to get out of this mess, we need to re-examine our approach to cooperation with the tribal co-managers.

Some interesting points are brought up here. From what I get from the boldt decision, We are supposed to have the right to 50% of the harvestable runs of salmon and the treaty tribes get up to 50% plus fish for ceremonial reasons. Over the last several years, the tribal percentage has been well over the 50% number (especially in Puget Sound) and we have seen a steady decline of opportunity (i.e. closures and shorter seasons) and participation and an increase in frustration and bad feelings between non-tribal (especially sports) groups and the co-managers. All of this really came to a head this year @ the NOF meetings. The Feds (NOAA) need to respect the rights of BOTH parties and make sure the boldt decision is followed as well as the Stevens act which directs that all parties bargain in good faith, respect each others fishery, and be transparent @ the NOF process. This clearly is not happening, and it is the job of the feds to enforce this. I would love to see the day when we sports get treated fairly with stable seasons to be able to selectively harvest hatchery fish, ALL Chinook and Coho hatchery smolts are clipped, the treaty tribes choose to harvest using selective harvest methods, and the WDFW and co-managers have a positive working relationship putting our precious resource first as it should be so we can ALL work together to improve the habitat! This would be economically beneficial for all of us, tribal and non-tribal. Puget Sound should be a salmon paradise, instead of what it is now. For now, NOAA needs to grow a pair and enforce these rules that are currently in place and make sure all sides respect and abide by them, and hopefully this upcoming NOF can be more civil. A couple of things that us sports can do is to join CCA and become more active.