I’m sure those dreaming of further federal dollars flowing into the area are celebrating the latest announcement of “Major cutbacks for salmon fisheries” (Articles in both Sequim Gazette and Peninsula Daily News).
Due to predicted weak coho salmon runs, fishing in Washington waters this summer will be greatly restricted and perhaps completely closed. However, further Endangered Species Act listings of weak coho runs could be a financial boon to the area. My fear is that few fish and continued federal funding is exactly what those in charge of “saving” our fish actually want.
I grew up in this area, fishing salmon and steelhead in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and on peninsula rivers. In the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s, fish were abundant, predators were managed to keep numbers low and fish hatcheries were pumping out fish to supplement the runs.
What has changed since then? Predators have experienced population explosions. Nylon nets have greatly reduced and/or wiped out entire runs of fish. Fish hatcheries have been closed or vastly restricted in the number of fish they are allowed to produce.
We now have an estimated 1,200 seals living in the Protection Island/Dungeness Spit area alone (each eating 8-13 pounds of seafood every single day). An estimated 30,000 seals live in the greater Puget Sound region compared to 4,000 before the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Hundreds of mergansers live on each of our rivers year-round. With bird sanctuaries inside the Dungeness Spit and on Protection Island, any smolt or baitfish in our area have little chance of survival. Along our rivers, the side streams/side channels that used to be full of salmon and steelhead smolt are now virtually devoid of any fish.
“Loss of habitat” is a favorite buzz-word and common excuse as to why the fish runs are disappearing. This is a lie. We have some of the most pristine and clean waters in the world, virtually unchanged from the time I grew up and fish runs were thriving.
How could they have taken our Pacific Northwest steelhead and salmon to the far less desirable conditions in the Great Lakes Region and, with aggressive hatchery programs, produced a world-class fishery if the problem here is “habitat”?
Please explain to me how we can blame the lack of fish on the loss of habitat!
Background on hatcheries, runs
The effort to shut down our fish hatcheries is crazy. The Dungeness Hatchery was built in 1908 and hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest were supplementing fish runs heavily through the mid-1900s. To think that we now need to restore the “pure” native strain of wild fish unique to each individual river is ludicrous.
The spring chinook run on the Sol Duc River was started with brood stock from the Dungeness and other rivers. Hoh River chinook were brought in to enhance runs in the Lake Washington area. Early run chinook found in the Hoh River are said to be “lost” Sol Duc River fish. The Dungeness chinook are Endangered Species Act-listed, yet the fish we’re trying to “save” mostly return in late summer. These aren’t even true Dungeness fish because the original chinook run began in April and they were all up the river by the end of June!
Transplant some spring chinook from the Sol Duc River into the Dungeness if you want something closer to what was originally here. Twenty-two years of a 350-square-mile summer fishing closure around the Dungeness River mouth (from Port Angeles to Port Townsend) has done nothing to save the river, but it’s kept the species on the ESA list and maybe that’s the goal.
The idea of identifying fish by DNA unique to each river and only restoring those genetics needs to be abandoned. The “genes” were all mixed up long ago and we should be simply trying to restore fish runs on rivers regardless of where the parent fish are from. Did not the Mount Saint Helens eruption show us how fish voluntarily move back and forth between rivers?
A chinook salmon is a chinook salmon, whether it is from the Skagit River or the Hoh River. It is like saying we can’t transplant bighorn sheep from Montana to a herd nearing extinction in Washington because there might me some genetic marker that is slightly different. Truth be told, a little mixing of genetics normally produces a stronger and more resilient fish or animal.
Don’t you wish that we had millions of salmon/steelhead smolt safe in hatcheries somewhere when droughts and devastating floods happen? Maybe the folks who built those early hatcheries had figured something out that we need to relearn.
If hatchery fish are so “inferior” (as claimed), I suggest we try using wild brood stock and retaining smolt in the hatcheries a shorter time. Even an inferior fish is preferable to no fish.
Even our local lakes are no longer stocked with trout. Today it is almost impossible to find a place near here with enough fish to take a kid fishing and keep him interested.
I guess with no opportunity to teach the younger generation to fish, no one will care when this older generation along with all our fishing opportunities are gone.
I recently was complimenting a member of the Quinault Tribe on their outstanding steelhead hatchery program. They have abundant and robust returning steelhead. Many fish weighing in the “teens,” commonly 20 pounds and occasionally even 30 pounds. To say these are elite fish is an understatement.
However, I’m told, our state fisheries folks have requested that they “rethink” this program. The explanation is that these healthy hatchery fish are eating so much food in the ocean that it is causing the native steelhead to die out. Wow. Someone figures out a hugely successful hatchery program and our “leaders” dream up this unbelievable excuse to shut it down.
Finding solutions
We should be duplicating that program throughout the state but “no,” that might result in rivers again flush with fish and the end of federal dollars.
I have to believe that what’s going on here is all about money from ESA listings, with considerable help from dreamers who only want to see pure wild fish with no human intervention. Unless things change quickly, this latter group will soon learn that they have been instrumental in helping along the demise of all our fishing opportunity in the Pacific Northwest.
But I don’t believe it needs to end that way. With a plan to manage predator populations (seals, sea lions, cormorants and mergansers in particular), innovative and robust hatchery programs, and tribes willing to limit their fishing to subsistence use only (no commercial marketing of wild fish — especially steelhead), I’m confident we could again have abundant fish.
Darryl Sanford
Sequim
Note: This column has been greatly pared down to allow printing in the newspaper. For a copy of the full story, contact darrylsanford@hotmail.com.
