"A total of 13,100 salmon and steelhead were caught with purse seines and 7,900 with beach seines. The trap nets were generally ineffective with a total of 39 fish captured for the season, including 10 chinook, 26 coho and three steelhead."

"All three gear types allow the fish to be encircled while leaving them free-swimming. Fish can be identified and released by type or species with a minimum amount of handling."

The Columbia Basin Bulletin is a treasure trove of information about salmon and steelhead and other fish enhancement efforts. Thank God for their reporting, because I see so much other political and bureaucratic bungling and selfishness that you just want to scream sometimes. Trying to bring sanity to commercial harvesting of salmon on the Columbia River, where there are multiple endangered runs, has taken a citizens group, the CCA, to jumpstart the whole thing.

Nobody wants to get rid of the commercial fishermen and the tribal fishing; the communities want a crack at feeding their bodies this good nutritious food. There is so little good food anymore. The commercial fishermen have been around since the mid 1800s and kicked into high gear on the Columbia River when the "Iron Chink" was invented a hundred years ago to allow high speed canning. The Puget Sound machinists beat the Astoria machinists to the punch in inventing it, but didn't slow the Astoria canneries down in adopting the technology.

Back then they used beach seines predominately, drawn in by draft horses. Very effective. When the runs got knocked down with this very efficient method, and especially when engines became available, the gillnet fleet developed. If you want to use the argument that the oldest historical methods should be gone back to, the choice is obvious. Maybe not to the current small gillnet fleet.

And then are we to look back to any historical practice as having 'rights.' These rights are not in the Constitution I go by. The current harvesters, by any means, whether gillnetter, seiner, barbed hook fisher, or barbless hook fisher, have a responsibility to look out for the needs of fellow harvesters and consumers. Even though it seems to be the norm, Americans necessarily need to work together to solve problems. I think the hundreds of thousands of fry-it-in-a-pan type fishermen would gladly all pitch in to buy a purse seiner for every gillnetter to get them to stop willy-nilly killing everything that swam into a gillnet in the Columbia.

My first job at the age of 15 was on a gillnet boat. I know what the mortality rate is. It isn't pretty for the species you don't want to take back to shore. This method of fishing is a good way to catch herring though. The herring school is all that there is there where you set, and your mesh size can even let the little ones swim through to grow up. And if they are used in deep water, they don't hang up on bottom and end up 'ghost fishing' like what happens all the time on the Columbia.

I don't know why I went on and on about the Columbia gillnetters today. I just wanted to call attention to the CBB as a superb news journal on-line. It's not inflamatory as I've been accused of being. And I want to give credit for good work to save the fish runs where credit is due. Thousands of taxpaying citizens flocked to the banner of the Coastal Conservation Association when they started up in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago, because there was no other banner to flock to to get anything done. The runs were going straight to, well, you know. Now there is a lot of rescue work going on. I bothers me when people who do nothing at all, sit in their arm chairs and bash folk like the almost ten thousand CCA members around the Columbia river.

This is the year 2011. You don't have to do the same old thing over and over again and expect different results. I'm talking about gillnetting salmon and expecting it to all of a sudden become a selective fishing method. You can scam the numbers all you want, but it still does not fit the needs of the state of the Columbia River salmon runs in 2011. I've fished with gillnet, purse seine and beach seine and know of what I speak. Even though the beach seining was on a fish farm in Israel.

And while I'm on a roll, here's information from Food and Water Watch on NOAA's run at pushing ocean aquaculture:

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is on track to approve the first factory fish farm in U.S. federal waters by issuing a fishing permit and treating its cages as a type of fishing gear. If approved, this would open up the rest of our federal waters to factory fish farming. This means there will be giant cages crammed full of fish eating, excreting and growing with wastes, excess feed and any chemicals used going straight into the ocean through the cages. This isn't fishing!"

We should hold off a sec to see what the Cohen Commission in Canada comes up with as the reason for the Fraser River sockeye runs declining. The baby sockeye swim through waters infested with sea lice from the fish farm cages and they get the life sucked out of them. Many in Canada think the government there has as little concern for the general welfare of the wild salmon as they did for their Atlantic cod, which was almost extinguished altogether. Everyone should look at the Cohen Commission's proceedings at least as an expample of what it would look like in this country if there were some unforseen environmental disaster with the cage fisheries(?). That should be a red flag right there.