times are hard. people are hungry. when they start addressing the nets issue, and mean it, well. nuff said. they put us into this crap. grays harbor group is currently suiting the dept, for years of not letting the public know, that they have been setting netting seasons, even with all the esa listings, thats we sportsman have to obey. how can it help, if this keeps going? if i get a king, next few days, trolling low on this river, i may just bonk it to.. over 55, paid my dues.

Well, basically we all know fishing is a bit of an honor system -and there are a lot of folks doing illegal activity-I warned the guys since it is a huge fine if caught. I really did not understand the whole native american fishing rights thing (and still am not an expert) but I read a very interesting book (you can get it for $6 on Amazon used) called King of Fish 1000 year run of salmon-not only does it tell you how we have systematically destroyed our salmon runs globally-it gets into detail in the PAC NW and not surprisingly it is the white man that has really done it-the native americans never took more than 1/2 of the spawners headed upriver-we took a lot more and destroyed most of the runs-tried to supplant them with hatchery runs-not very successful. But-the bottom line is that we screwed them out of their fishing rights when we made deals for their land-they were unable to harvest the way we did (out in the sound) since they had no capital for boats back then and could not borrow money, -we gave them upriver rights but fish never got there-so a big part of what they are getting now is "sovereign rights" which they deserved in the first place. However, I am not sure how many are being taken-we deserve to have that knowledge, etc and maybe if we were all more in the know about what and when they are netting we could plan our fishing accordingly-I have seen fisheries folks cutting illegal nets on the Stilly before so there is culpability on that side too. BTW-the kings are total boots....