If you and you friends are catching 50 sockeye for every 2 chinnook you land {over any period of time}then you shouldn't be fishing the way your fishing, whether you think it won't hurt the run or not, that's the biggest issue I have with this entire BS thread. Talk nets all you want {we all know how bad it is}but this is a sports fishing forum, nothing more so that's what I stay focused on and IMO as well as your confession you've caught waaaay too many sockeye to be doing what your doing.
I can say your flossing all these fish and you can argue it's your secret color combo all day long, I don't think we are going to budge on our opinions so I'll stick with my opinion and you can yours.
What have you done, personally, to try to fix the issues with the nets, or anything else? I know a lot of people on this board do and hopefully you are too but that isn't how you strike me.
In my opinion, net shouldn't be used in the river. Give them money toward getting gill nets and let them fish in the sound to catch their fish. Or give them free license to fish with pole or dip nets in the river. That is how it used to be when there was a joint commission between us and you. Unfortunately, WA is probably more messed up than you and the Fraser is at least big enough that some fish get by the nets. I grew up near the Nooksack. It didn't take very long once the nets went into the river that runs that were amazing went to endangered. Prior to that, there were very strict regulations on a whole number of fish, only being able to keep hatchery fin clipped fish, or the dorsal fin had to be smaller than a certain size, etc. And yet, when the coho and chinook were running, the bars would be packed with people bottom bouncing or plunking. Poaching was frequent. And yet, the runs stayed strong. My family actually started our own hatchery for coho and over the course of 5 or 6 years when the runs were down and raised close to a million salmon over those years to release into the system. The first year of return, we got some spawners coming back up a stream where they were pretty much gone from previously. The next year, nothing. When we tried to find out why, there was an illegal net place completely across the opening to the creek. And boy, there were some huge coho being pulled out of that net that we had raised. We reported it but fisheries in WA refuses to really monitor the nets at all. The Native American's themselves laughed when we reported it to them. They weren't going to do anything about it. We closed down the hatchery because we were just putting money into poacher's pockets. Once they found where the fish were going, not a single spawner got up the creek.
The nets down there would even hide it, put only half corks on so it wasn't really visible above the water or just enough corks to keep it a foot or two below the water. That made some guys with boats running up the river real happy and was very dangerous as you can imagine someone going 30-40 kph up river with a jet does when he suddenly stops when his motor snags that corkline. Some of them were just left there without being checked. We even had many sightings of nets being picked up, the fish being gutted, eggs put into a bucket to be sold and the fish carcass thrown back into the river. Some fisherman got tired of it so they would go up when the nets were not supposed to be in the river and drop in bales of hay that would roll down the river and collect any nets. They started getting charged but the guys with the nets were told to stop, while they are sitting there with their nets in the river and the officer would walk off. They wouldn't even make them make a show of stopping.
Unfortunately, I see the Fraser following the same path, just slower.
If you look at the Fraser, the amount of chinook coming through is quickly dwindling too. Springs have been completely shut down. Fall runs are nowhere near what they used to be. If you are such the idealist as you claim, then it shouldn't matter that chinook are open because you wouldn't want to catch those either as you would be taking just one possible spawner out of the possible pool. You would spend every minute that you would have spent fishing trying to fix it, or fishing a stream that isn't currently hurting. I have spent that time. I am resigned to the fact that the dirt people and political correctness is going to drive these fish into being endangered and hopefully then, they will close the whole fishery down and put forth the money to make sure the rules are followed. Unfortunately, I think the money will always be "better spent elsewhere" and even then, the gov't won't step up. I hate it for my kids who will never know the amazing fishing I grew up with.
If you look at the number of fish caught, or going in the test fisheries net, or any other item, the number of sockeye outnumber the number or chinook by a very large margin. Yes, there are methods where I could reduce the number of sockeye I caught but frankly, I don't find them enjoyable. I enjoy feeling the fish hit which you just don't get bank fishing, or using a float, or heck, even trolling in the saltwater. If I was able to come later in the year, I probably wouldn't even bother with a bunch of the idiots up on the Fraser and would go some of the places in WA that I know well and know there won't be many idiots around and where I can catch fish using some pencil lead and a little spoon. That isn't an option for when I have to be up there.
Let's turn this around though. Let's say next year, chinook are way down but sockeye are coming out of your ears and instead of one over 50 cm and 3 under, they lower it to none over 50 cm and 1 under. Would you just stay home instead of risking catching a Chinook? I assume you wouldn't bar fish, you would go out and find a way to catch a couple sockeye without risking catching a chinook. What would you do if you hooked a big chinook? Cut your line so you don't have to fight the fish and lose the 5-10 dollars you have in whatever spoon or whatever you are using and hope the hook works its way free before the sinker gets caught on the rocks and traps the fish for a while? Give it a bunch of slack and pray it gets off itself? Try and get it in as quickly as possible risking losing it so you don't strain it any more than necessary? I would guess the last one is what most fisherman would do, which is also what we did. You can say it isn't the same or if you caught more than a couple you would change methods again but percentage wise with current runs, that one chinook, or two, are a higher percent of spawners than my 50 sockeye.
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Topic: bottom bouncing whats the big deal? (Read 102124 times)