In Response - By Bob Hooton

OldBlackDog

Well-Known Member
 
very predictable blog post - with the blogger yet again seemingly playing the victim on his own blog (IMHO) where he can control the messaging - and then appearing frustrated when he can't hijack the focus from a debate on his unsupported assertions/accusations on Area 23 to bully someone at their work because he lacks their personal/professional details - all simply because they simply dare disagree with his narrative. Most would categorize that behaviour as childish, unhelpful and unprofessional.

On here he (like myself) would be just another opinion with equal weight to any of the other hundreds of posters. Been my experience that leaders actually committed to effecting change are less concerned about constantly hearing their own voice but instead understand how to motivate and support people in a team environment. I appreciate that we can instead spend our valuable time and energy instead debating issues on here and leave the energy it takes for the time sucking personal attacks for the numerous unregulated and unaccountable personal blogs. Thanks mods.
 
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With all due respects, all I can see here is a text book straw man argument. There is lots of hot smoke being blown hither and yon with table pounding and finger jabbing at the messenger, but zero substantive comments about what DFO and the relevant advisory committees have in fact specifically done or plan on doing in conjunction with the local FN gill netters to protect Area 23 steelhead.

Here is the DFO language associated with aboriginal sockeye gill net openings in Region VI

QUOTE

ABORIGINAL - Salmon: Economic Opportunities
COMMERCIAL - Salmon: Gill Net

The target species in this fishery is Skeena Sockeye. The Total Allowable Catch of Skeena Sockeye is based on a share of the total Area C catch in the Skeena River Gillnet Area and Area A ITQ share per licence.

This gillnet fishery is being conducted with non-retention and non-possession of Coho, Chum, Chinook, and Steelhead. None of these species may be aboard a vessel that is engaged in fishing unless they are being revived in the revival tank immediately prior to release.

Operating revival boxes are mandatory and all prohibited species captured incidentally must be either revived in the revival tank and released, or released directly to the water with the least possible harm.

For more details, fishers are asked to read the conditions of licence issued by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or to contact the North Coast Skeena First Nations Stewardship Society Fisheries Program

UNQUOTE



Compare that to the language associated with the gill net openings in Area 23



QUOTE

Category(s):
COMMERCIAL - Salmon: Gill Net
Subject:
FN0996-COMMERCIAL - Salmon: Gill Net - Chinook - Alberni Inlet - Subareas 23-1 and 23-2 - Opening - September 6-7, 2022


The target species is Chinook. Incidentally caught Sockeye may be retained. Coho, Pink, Chum, and Steelhead may not be retained.

UNQUOTE


To the outsider looking in, it certainly appears that the advisory committees and DFO personnel in the Skeena region seem a bit more motivated to put some window dressing in the window of steelhead conservation then the advisory committees and DFO personnel representing Area 23


Speaking of *that Blog*. —- I watched that LFFA video—-the word steelhead was mentioned one time. I was surprised steelhead was even mentioned at all.


It seems abundantly clear from that LFFA video that IFS steelhead will be functionally extinct in the next five years. Area 23 steelhead will be right on their heels —- based on the terms of engagement for chinook/sockeye net fisheries for that region we see above, there does not appear to be any meaningful attempt to protect the last vestiges of these fish. None.

Meanwhile, Steelhead Voices seems to be pointing out one thing load and clear——the obvious.

At least somebody is doing it
 
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At least somebody is doing it
Thanks for the respectful, thoughtful post SH.

Well - as I've posted numerous times (in response):

1/ The 2 largest, most complex and difficult rivers (wrt enforcement, weak stocks, run timing, etc) in the Province are used as examples for steelhead management (or challenges with) by the blogger/post in question and unsubstantiated and unsupported claims are then transposed to the much smaller coastal systems that have clean sockeye runs. That speaks to me of lack of experience in theses issues.

2/ All fisheries management regimes are complex team efforts (verses being directed by belligerent bloggers) that should have several important components including accurate in-season escapement, catch data, monitoring & enforcement, and adaptability in regulatory processes.

3/ The management responses to any and all fisheries management challenges is to identify the issue 1st, weed out likely unrelated and likely unsuccessful responses and enforce the most successful responses. This is often called adaptive management, and should also include land-use impacts which has been very challenging since harper gutted numerous acts and enforcement capacity in the early 2000s. One of the single largest legacy impact to species with extensive freshwater residence (e.g. steelhead, coho & Chinook) still remains logging - and that assertion comes with supporting data/science. This is no "straw man argument" and remains largely unresolved to date for many if not most watersheds in the province.

4/ There are numerous impacts to all species/stocks of salmon (not just steelhead), including but not limited to fisheries (FN, commercial & rec), seals, global warming, urbanization & agriculture (for some watersheds) - and the list goes on. This doesn't negate any impacts that may be caused specifically by gillnet fisheries (which can be selective despite both supported and unsupported assertions from limited experience bloggers), but should add to the responsible management responses. Again - not a "straw man argument" but a reality that we all are dealing with - sometimes in a specific fisheries management regime, sometimes not yet - and sometimes those fisheries management regimes are missing all together.

5/ Blindly attacking (while not listening to) many people intimately involved in fisheries management with many years combined experience in diverse fisheries, and diverse fisheries management processes, and with many years experience in watersheds outside the Fraser/Skeena whom hold different views does nothing to move any ball down any court - besides being juvenile and ineffective - whatever the actual motive is or is claimed to be. Smacks simply of ego to me. What success has this strategy achieved? is the steelhead issue now magically resolved by some belligerent, my ego is offended blog rant? What about the all the other species/stocks? Maybe it is past time to rethink that strategy?
 
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09 AUG THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT GILL NETS​

Posted at 16:25h in CCANC News Blog, General by CCANC-Rip

Washinton-nets-300x211.jpg


Editor’s note: This story appeared in The Reel News, which covers outdoor issues in the Pacific Northwest

By Jim Tuggle

I read somewhere in the past few weeks, that Washington Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly Susewind proclaimed that “Gillnets are specie specific”. This statement has been eating at me for all of those weeks ever since I read it. The statement simply is not true. Director Susewind’s statement is symptomatic of what is wrong with the fish management division at WDFW. The Director is off to a rough start at WDFW because of the figurative mountain of ills he has to climb to regain credibility in the department’s salmon and steelhead management. I think he’s trying.

But statements like the gillnet one digs him a hole in the contentious issue of the use of gillnets in Washington state’s commercial salmon fisheries, especially on the Columbia River. Where did he get this mis-information? I don’t think he was ever a gillnetter, but I could be wrong. Has he been aboard a gillnetter when it was fishing? Who knows? My guess is that he gained this tidbit of mis-information from a staffer or staffers who think that gillnets are a good deal when it comes to harvest and they ill-advised Director Susewind. There’s a lot to discuss about gillnets.

First of all, gillnets are NOT specie specific. They are SIZE selective, but only to a degree. Second they are an efficient harvester, but they always have bycatch.

I began my career as a Fisheries Patrol Officer on July 1, 1971, starting with six weeks spent on a Fisheries Patrol vessel (Number 1, to be specific) operated out of Bellingham by Officer Auzy Ausmondson, a veteran of many years. Our priorities were to patrol the gillnet, purse seine and reef net fisheries in the general area of the northern San Juans, and Strait of Georgia back when the sockeye commercial fishery was a going concern. I watched a lot of gillnets being pulled that summer.

In the fall, I patrolled Puget Sound and Admiralty Inlet for the gillnet and purse seine fisheries there. I also pulled illegal gillnets from the Duwamish, Puyallup and Nisqually rivers in 1971 and ’72. In the summer of 1973, I was stationed on the Columbia River to patrol the commercial gillnet fishery, among a lot of other things. The Columbia had a healthy and vibrant run of salmon and steelhead in those days, and gillnet seasons were frequent. Mixed stocks of salmonids invaded the Columbia every month of the year.

In 1983, I was promoted to Fisheries Patrol Sergeant and supervised the patrol of gillnet and purse seine fisheries in mid to southern Puget Sound along with my other duties. To establish my credentials, I have observed likely thousands of gillnets pulled in my career, and also observed their catches. In addition I have pulled about a hundred gillnets myself – almost all of those were illegal and out of rivers.

Although the gillnet fisheries are not as prevalent as they were 40 years ago when we had robust salmon returns, they could be utilized again, but only if we can re-build our salmon abundance to a much higher level, and we’ve got a long way to go with that.

My experiences over the years of my career let me observe steelhead being taken by gillnets in the Columbia during Chinook salmon seasons, even though steelhead were not the targeted specie. In the early 1970’s a commercial fisherman on the Columbia could sell steelhead in Oregon, but not in Washington. Fisheries seasons designed to catch Chinook inadvertently caught steelhead. The web of a gillnet for both the spring and fall commercial fisheries was of a larger size to target Chinook but it didn’t keep a fisherman from also landing large steelhead as well as Coho and the rare chum.

Often sturgeon became wrapped in the web of a net sized to target either Coho or Chinook. Those who targeted sturgeon in a sturgeon-only fishery were required to use a much larger mesh. But still, they would frequently catch a salmon of some kind. I arrested several of them for doing just that when they kept the salmon outside of the sturgeon-only season. Gillnets are a highly effective tool to harvest salmon, but they are far, far from being species specific.

A really tragic example of this was experienced in the early 2000’s. Salmon managers wanted to be able to open a Columbia River spring Chinook gillnet season for a predicted healthy run of hatchery springers, so they did. They ill-advisedly adopted a Coho sized gillnet restriction (about 51/2 inch mesh) in order to have that smaller mesh size act as a tangle-tooth net for the larger specie. It backfired to a tragic degree. The gillnets killed about 21,000 steelhead – mostly wild! The smaller mesh designed to take Coho was perfect for killing large wild steelhead that run in the Columbia the same time as the targeted Chinook. Again, gillnets are not specie specific.

In the early 1990’s The Department of Fisheries hired a paid informant who was a gillnetter to get enforcement officers inside information and a connection to some of the major poaching problems in the commercial fisheries in Puget Sound. I was surprised at the amount of steelhead and immature Chinook that were black marketed in the late chum and Coho gillnet season in November.

Even though the chum were a little larger than the winter run steelhead, still the bycatch was really high. That helped explain to me the rapid decline of the early steelhead population in rivers like the Puyallup and Nisqually. The bycatch was not documented on required landing documents. (That would be a good reason for having observers aboard random vessels during commercial seasons, rather than merely studying landing receipts.)

The informant put us onto a lot of egregious violations, not all of which were non-Indian related. A big raid by Fisheries officers on the Nisqually cost the Tribal Police Chief his job. I was there.

Early chum salmon bound for northern Hood Canal were routinely harvested in Coho gillnet fisheries years ago. (The chum became listed under ESA.) Why the bycatch? Because the chum are the same size as Coho. But there is more than a gillnet’s mesh size to be effective. They aren’t quite the single wall of net that many believe. It’s all about how the fisherman “hangs” the net when he’s building it.

Columbia netters often “string” their nets from the cork line to the lead line with “strings” (heavy twine, actually) so that the net hangs from the cork line limp and loose, not taught. This creates an even more effective tool for catching salmon. The mesh becomes more effective because it amounts to a smaller mesh from being limp rather than stretched more tightly. Some gillnets are even constructed to have a double wall, or apron effect when hung by an expert. That not only increases the net’s effectiveness considerably, but also their bycatch. Gillnets are only SIZE selective.
 
Thanks again for a helpful post from an experienced poster, SH. I would agree with his observations noting that what he states agrees with what I have consistently posted.

Note that he is very specific about where he describes bycatch - the Columbia (another large, complex river with weak stocks) and the marine gill net fisheries (mixed stocks). Note that he does not describe small watersheds and terminal fisheries. Note his comment: "The smaller mesh designed to take Coho was perfect for killing large wild steelhead that run in the Columbia the same time as the targeted Chinook.". Managing fishing during the run timing of any weak stocks is always key to bycatch management.

Again, I reiterate that most smaller coastal systems have a run timing for sockeye that is often >95% clean sockeye with often 3-5% pinks as the bycatch. Often that run only lasts 3-4 weeks in total. Sometimes the smaller systems do not have Chinook nor Chinook fisheries.

Black marketing fish can be a problem - and not just for gill net fisheries. But the bycatch in FN gill net fisheries is most often retained as an FSC allocation if not a directed FSC fishery. Again, enforcement and monitoring is often an issue particularly on the Fraser. Those issues are also not specific to just gill net fisheries.

And he describes differences in net construction and fishing techniques as well - something I also have previously mentioned.
 
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Interesting points of info and debate. Agree with many of points made in response by AA. I would note that contrary to assumptions posted regarding what the A23 HRT is doing to mitigate potential SH interception this is and has been an issue of discussion. As noted the central questions faced are understanding what the actual interceptions are, where/when they occur, and then based on that what are the appropriate mitigation strategies that could be employed to pass SH through these mixed stock fisheries. Let's also be real here - very unlikely there is a realistic chance a window closure or selective fishery strategy that could be implemented without considerable effort and time. Thinking otherwise is simply a load of idealism without regard for a well designed implementation strategy IMO.
 

Any steelhead byecatch in this net is high and dry gasping for air. A classic example of "species selective" fishing technique.
 
Interesting points of info and debate. Agree with many of points made in response by AA. I would note that contrary to assumptions posted regarding what the A23 HRT is doing to mitigate potential SH interception this is and has been an issue of discussion. As noted the central questions faced are understanding what the actual interceptions are, where/when they occur, and then based on that what are the appropriate mitigation strategies that could be employed to pass SH through these mixed stock fisheries. Let's also be real here - very unlikely there is a realistic chance a window closure or selective fishery strategy that could be implemented without considerable effort and time. Thinking otherwise is simply a load of idealism without regard for a well designed implementation strategy IMO.

Translation in laymen’s terms:

Advisory panels and commercial sport guides don’t want to rock the FN boat in A23 so we scratch their backs, they scratch ours, and we wink at each other knowing the steelhead are all dead anyway
 
Interesting points of info and debate. Agree with many of points made in response by AA. I would note that contrary to assumptions posted regarding what the A23 HRT is doing to mitigate potential SH interception this is and has been an issue of discussion. As noted the central questions faced are understanding what the actual interceptions are, where/when they occur, and then based on that what are the appropriate mitigation strategies that could be employed to pass SH through these mixed stock fisheries. Let's also be real here - very unlikely there is a realistic chance a window closure or selective fishery strategy that could be implemented without considerable effort and time. Thinking otherwise is simply a load of idealism without regard for a well designed implementation strategy IMO.
And just where are you going to get accurate data to answer this question? Knowing how the commercial and FN fisheries operate I can guarantee you nobody will fess up to catching ANY steelhead. Are you going to put an unbiased, thick skinned, competent observer on every boat that tosses out a seine or gillnet? The rest of your plan is dead in the water without data
 
And just where are you going to get accurate data to answer this question? Knowing how the commercial and FN fisheries operate I can guarantee you nobody will fess up to catching ANY steelhead. Are you going to put an unbiased, thick skinned, competent observer on every boat that tosses out a seine or gillnet? The rest of your plan is dead in the water without data
Not reporting steelhead catch in commercial fisheries has been going on for decades. Back when I was a pup, about 50 years ago, I spent summers in Tofino and Ucluelet working for the now defunct IPSFC. My job was to take scale samples of day caught and ice boat sockeye, and to collect landing slips of all catches. To do the sampling I had to dig through totes of fish … sockeye, coho, chinook, pinks and steelhead. I never saw a steelhead marked as such on these declared caught landing slips. When I asked the buyers about this I was told they were purchased as coho. This practice was universal at the app dozen fish packing plants in both towns, and most likely, everywhere there were fish buyers.
 
It’s not rockets science, look at the test boats they catch steelhead doing 6 seine sets n a day or gillnets catch them doing 30 min test sets.

Then the fleet goes out with 100 boats s and fish hours at a time and suddenly they are not catching steelhead.

Either the test boats are the best fishermen at catching steelhead or the commercial guys are lying
 
A quote from someone who tried to get steelhead catch information from the DFO in the A32 net fisheries:

QUOTE

The response to my inquiry about steelhead catches for the fisheries I have referenced here is instructive. It comes from the DFO person responsible for oversight of those fisheries. “A summary of steelhead catches for Barkley Sound and Alberni Inlet will be reported in a post-season report to come out later this year. As of now the information is in the preliminary stages so I don’t have any finalized numbers to provide at this time.” I also inquired about “conditions of license”, a term referred to in all DFO announcements pertaining to First Nations net fishery openings in the marine waters. I was advised to contact the fisheries representatives of the two principle First Nations involved to determine what that terminology meant. I did that and have yet to receive a reply from either. So, the take home from all of this is the senior authority for DFO who distributes all the fishery announcement information doesn’t know what the conditions attached to all that FN fishing are, doesn’t know what the steelhead catch figures are for any of the fishing, FN or otherwise, that has occurred to date and won’t know until months from now.

UNQUOTE

A post season report? Try and square that with the “well designed implementation strategy” referenced above. The truth is—-nobody even lifts a finger to create a believable database for steelhead net interceptions for management or ‘mitigation” or any other purposes.

Why? Because they don’t have to. Nobody is holding their feet to the fire or threatening their jobs and if all the user groups are complicit in pretending steelhead don’t exist, nobody’s boat gets rocked and they can slobber side by side at the trough with impunity
 
And those are the questions being asked at the HRT, and requests for the data on steelhead interceptions so we can better understand the issues and focus on identifying mitigation strategies. Regardless it will take a lot of time and energy to shift these fisheries. And if you want to pursue that yourself - get engaged in the HRT process. Sniping about it on these blogs or forums accomplishes jack crap.
 
And those are the questions being asked at the HRT, and requests for the data on steelhead interceptions so we can better understand the issues and focus on identifying mitigation strategies. Regardless it will take a lot of time and energy to shift these fisheries. And if you want to pursue that yourself - get engaged in the HRT process. Sniping about it on these blogs or forums accomplishes jack crap.
So in effect the HRT process has failed as requests for data on Steelhead interceptions have not been met? If the process is broken on the steelhead front, on what front is it successful? And for whom is it successful for?
 
And those are the questions being asked at the HRT, and requests for the data on steelhead interceptions so we can better understand the issues and focus on identifying mitigation strategies.
This has been a well known, ongoing issue for decades. DFO has done its best impression of the Trump legal team, delay delay delay. It has been studied to death. Accurate data has never, and will never, be given by those in the fishery. Your mitigation strategy mission is simply pie in the sky. People are sniping because they can see the obvious, nothing has been done and nothing will be done. It is already too late for many watersheds, and the remaining few viable steelhead streams are heading the same way.
 
This has been a well known, ongoing issue for decades. DFO has done its best impression of the Trump legal team, delay delay delay. It has been studied to death. Accurate data has never, and will never, be given by those in the fishery. Your mitigation strategy mission is simply pie in the sky. People are sniping because they can see the obvious, nothing has been done and nothing will be done. It is already too late for many watersheds, and the remaining few viable steelhead streams are heading the same way.

Exactly. When it comes to steelhead vs. gill nets and how to build a believable data base that quantifies those impacts in order to mitigate those impacts, Doing Nothing is the elephant in the room and has been for over a decade.

I read and re-read the “new and improved” Canadian Fisheries Act and try to square the “new and improved” language (essentially, Do No Harm to Any Fish Resource....Period) with how DFO and its “advisory groups” have gone about prosecuting gill net fisheries in A23 and in the Fraser and it certainly appears that the intent of the Canadian Fisheries Act never even came up on the table.

My greatest fear is that Do Nothing approach is now an acceptable management regime and it will now be used hook, line and sinker by the DFO and its advisory groups in Prince Rupert to let the last remnants of Skeena River steelhead swirl down the same careless drain as the steelhead in A23 and IFS
 
The reality is a Fraser like steelhead closure window would be a devastating to fisheries in the area and no one is going to push for that period.
 
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