That opening line up of boats was probably the mouth of the Egegik in Bristol Bay. That's a normal scene on an opener---occasionally people get shot if they "cork" someone off (drop their gear on the up-current side of someone else's net).
I did a few seasons up there--those were exciting times for me. Believe it or not, carnage vid notwithstanding, it's one of the most finely-tuned conservation-minded fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. Really.
ADF&G have electronic counting grids across the mouths of every river---Nushugak, Egegik, Naknek etc and they track the fish coming in on every tide. When they have enough for spawning they open it up to the commies. Or they stagger it throughout the season (openings and closures thoughout June/July until the whole system has been seeded with spawners)
Here's a fact of nature---if Bristol Bay shut down next June/July and they didn't let a single boat fish, the returning numbers of sockeye a few year's later (offspring from the spawners that had a white card to spawn with no nets or boats to harass them) would not necessarily exceed the numbers of returning spawners from a year in which boats and nets DID do a carnage number on the fish.
It's called redd superimposition: you only have so much spawning gravel square acreage in each river system to support a redd (the stacked up gravel fish leave when digging a nest) So if you unleash a wall of unmolested fish, you'll have fish digging up the redds of fish that spawned before them, over and over and over again. Piles more fish go into the system, but basically you end up with the same numbers of eggs that successfully get buried and hatch (there are 10 pound rainbow trout in all those rivers that are gobbling up all the eggs that don't get buried when fish dig up other fish's redds)
It's just the way it is---that carnage will happen with or without the boats (either the adults get caught and go to Japan or they're allowed to spawn and their eggs go into a rainbow trout or just drift downstream back out into Bristol Bay and shrivel up and do nothing)
The one factor not taken into consideration, however---all the fish removed by nets don't end up dying in the river and donating their nutrients back to the system, whether they successfully spawned or not. That is a HUGE problem---biologists have only just began to realize how critical it is in keeping systems healthy ---that might be the biggest downside of commercial and sportsfisheries----they permanently remove nutrients from river systems
