Fin-clipping follies

Steelhead with clipped ventral fin from Sol Duc River.

Lately someone asked me when it was a good time to catch a salmon. 

Which seemed like a funny question at the time. 

Kind of like asking when it's a good time to win the lottery. 

The trouble is a lot of the time you can't fish or legally keep the salmon you catch because of an absurd regulation that requires you to release a fish with an adipose fin and only keep the fish that's had this fin clipped at the hatchery. This brutal mutilation is painful and provides an extra degree of handling and stress at a time in their lives when these young salmon are about attempt a true miracle of life, swimming from fresh to salt water.  

Hatchery summer steelhead with clipped
adipose fin and large predator bite.

The survivors swim thousands of miles to the northern sea and back where a fleet waits to catch the fin clipped salmon. This may require you to catch many unclipped fish in the process. 

Making it possible to go out and catch fish all day and come home without one to eat. Meanwhile, hungry seals have been following you around snacking on the worn out fish you just fought to the boat and released. 

The mortality of catch-and-release fishing in the saltwater would be tough to guesstimate since the seals eat the evidence. In the Frazier River where they put released fish in pens up to 45 percent of them died. 

We had good salmon fishing in the salt chuck last summer. 

I wonder how many thousands of salmon were fed to the seals and crabs in the name of conservation. All done in an effort to determine if a fish was a clipped hatchery fish, a wild fish or an unclipped hatchery fish. 

Some hatcheries don't bother to clip their fish for a variety of reasons. Other fish hatcheries clip other fins, the ventral, pectoral and dorsal are hacked off at random for reasons my research has failed to discover. 

This can make for an interesting series of fishing regulations. 

I have spent years studying the fishing laws in an attempt to translate them into English. The most difficult part of cracking this code was the little known “credit card” edict. Also known as “The Game Warden Employment Security Act,”  that requires you to release any fish with a dorsal fin wider than the width of a credit card, whether it is clipped or not. 

It is a severe test of sporting ethic to reel in a 20-pound hatchery steelhead with half its dorsal fin missing, only to find what's left of the fin is wider than a credit card. 

It is at this point you are even required to release what is obviously a hatchery fish. Causing some of the locals to practice alternative “filet and release” fishing methods.

The clipped fin rules were designed to allow a selective harvest of hatchery fish because they are presumed to be different if not inferior to the wild ones. 

What is the difference between a 20 pound wild or hatchery steelhead? Scientists are still studying the problem. Meanwhile thousands of clipped fin salmon are getting ready to swim up rivers where you can catch and legally keep up to four a day. 

The best time to catch salmon is before they have been in the fresh water long enough to turn red. Wait till after a hard rain turns the river brown. This will bring bright salmon up the river.

When will it rain? If I knew the answer to that question, would I be writing a column about clipping fish fins?