With regards to the salmon stamp, and the prices of licences...my girlfriend has recently become very interested in the sport and I have been showing her the ropes. To her the licences were way too expensive...and her first reaction was "do I really need one?"...I of course explained to her many of the reasons she needed one, including that she would not be going fishing anywhere with me without one....so she purchased her licence at berry's and called me on her cell to check with me about the stamp. She informed me that the guy there had told her she didn't need one unless she was going to keep a fish...so I had her put the guy on the phone and he reiterated it to me that this was true, "check it online if you like...". I did, it's true. I then told my girlfriend to buy the stamp anyways to support salmon conservation and that we could talk about why we needed to buy the stamp later....
Now she has picked up this river thing like a pro...she's fishing a little centerpin I set up for her, short floating, reading water, staying away from the redds, the chum and the springs as best she can AND picking up on all the ethics and finer aspects of the sport as it should be...in fact I would be proud to fish with anyone that has the respect, determination and skill that she has, anytime. But without my guidance she would surely not have bought a stamp, probably not a licence, and likely would have learned by watching others bottom bounce and never would have known better. Yet she is the kind of person who now, trully loves the sport and I assure you would be willing to spend that 200 bucks on the licence,...but wouldn't have when she started, so I don't think the hugely expensive licence thing is a solution that sits well with me anyways....if licences were that way, we would have lost a really good rod, and my girl never would have realized just how much she loves the sport. It's all she wants to do now, well mostly.....
So, another suggestion I will add to the list of great suggestions we have here is
- make salmon stamp purchase mandatory, retention or no retention (but no exhorbitant licences fees)
- AND for those problem areas such as KWB and below lickman road, these might be good candidate areas to put together some habitat restoration measures...Ie: permanently place several or many logs in these trouble spots to discourage the snag fest that is down there. Such measures will also provide refuge for salmon fry, not to mention returning adults....giving them a break, they need it.
thx,
rib