Bull trout bull

A sharp eyed reader suggested a correction to my column about the Dungeness Valley Creamery. It’s one of two remaining dairies in the Sequim Dungeness Valley.

The future operation of the dairy is being threatened by Clallam County’s plan to move the flood control dikes from along the Dungeness River to restore the habitat of the endangered bull trout.

Oops, I did it again, called the bull trout endangered. The fact is the bull trout is not endangered. 
It has been federally listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. “Threatened,” according to the government definition means the species is likely to become “endangered.” An “endangered” species means it’s likely to become extinct.

Please excuse my confusion. I only know what I read in the fishing laws, where it says it is illegal to lift a bull trout out of the water. 
Forget about eating a bull trout for dinner. You could lose your fishing license for that.

Not that anyone ever bragged about eating a bull trout in the old days. They can be soft and mushy with bland white-meat. 
Who wouldn’t rather catch a fat, red-meated steelhead or a salmon than a bull trout? They were seen as scavengers that ate the eggs and spawn of the salmon and steelhead.

Nobody really ever cared about catching a bull trout, until there weren’t any salmon or steelhead and there was nothing but bull trout left.

The idea that anyone would call the bull trout threatened or endangered is a joke to anyone who has ever fished the Dungeness, where on any given day you could catch four bull trout for every rainbow.  

That was until the Dungeness, a river with two fish hatcheries on it, was closed to fishing for most of the year.  This seemed to confirm the old saying, when fishing is outlawed, only outlaws will fish. There were so many poachers on the Dungeness last summer they did not get an adequate return of spring Chinook back to the hatchery.

The Dungeness spring chinook is a run of salmon worth saving. These are the “first salmon” of the Northwest.

That means they run up the river in early spring when the salmonberry blossoms. These fish don’t spawn until August. The spring chinook don’t feed in the river, they survive and develop into spawners on their body fat. This makes the spring chinook the richest of the salmon.

There used to be an awesome chinook fishery right out in Dungeness Bay every spring when the dogwoods bloomed. Many of these fish were produced at the Dungeness Fish hatchery.

Hatchery fish have been getting a bad rap for failing in recent years. Runs of hatchery fish always fail after you lay off the hatchery workers and stop feeding the fish.

Sping chinook are the key to restoring the Dungeness-Greywolf ecosystem. Their migration up into the mountains was an exchange of nutrients from the ocean to the land that endured since the last Ice Age.

Everything from the trees to the bugs fed on the carcasses of spawned out salmon.

The fact that we have interrupted this cycle is an intolerable ecological disaster. Our salmon are overharvest throughout the extent of their range. There is just too much nylon fishing gear in the water. We need a responsible hatchery program to mitigate this nylon pollution.

So you can take out all the dikes on the lower Dungeness and it won’t matter to the fish. There have never been any dikes on the upper Dungeness and the fish up there are just as endangered.

Oops, I mean threatened. 

  

A good day's fishing

“Call me when the fishing’s good,” my fancy friend said.

I wish had a dollar for every time I heard that one. As a professional fishing guide I can tell you that it’s only natural for people to want to go fishing when they have the best chance at catching one of the rarest critters that swim, the steelhead.

It is called the fish of 1,000 casts, which might translate into 10,000 oar strokes in a drift boat, or 10 miles of slogging muddy rainforest trails through tangles of vine maple and devil’s club to find a secret fishing hole that’s clogged with other anglers who all have one thing in common: They came to the North Olympic Peninsula seeking solitude and a chance to catch what many consider the greatest game fish on Earth.

As a guide on the cutting edge of the tourist industry I tell people they should have been here 100 years ago. The fishing was ruined here with the coming of the railroad, but you can still have a good day. Unfortunately, many people wouldn’t know a good day’s fishing if it snagged them with a treble hook.

Half the people who fish for steelhead don’t catch one. They are skunked. Skunking can lead to depression and a feeling of inadequacy that can directly translate into other areas of your personal life.

Conversely, watching a 3-foot-long chrome-plated trout peel out 100 yards of line and jump into the sunrise can allow you to forget your dead-end career, abusive relationship and nagging health problems long enough to enjoy life. These sordid details of a doomed existence are somehow pushed to the back burner when you hear the words, “Fish on!”

The experience has been known to release endorphins into the blood stream that can adjust serotonin levels in the brain, in a manner consistent with other forms of addictive behavior.

The symptoms of a fish induced psychosis can take many forms. The angler may wear rubber boots when it is not raining. They obsess on the weather report. They may smell like fish.

They develop physical maladies like minor burns on their thumbs caused by hot fish peeling line off the reel. Or, they may suffer from tennis elbow without ever having played the game. They got it from setting the hook on one too many fish. They may develop problems at work if they still have a job. Few employers enjoy having production stopped just so the crew can look at my fish pictures or listen to the one-that-got-away-fables that only foster an inbred sense of failure. 
Typically, the beginning angler starts out happy to catch one steelhead a day. They think that is good fishing. As the season progresses however, they are driven to catch another and another fish to get the same buzz they used to get catching just one. They may go on fishing binges that can last for days, the only purpose of which is to catch larger and brighter fish.

The mystical connection between man and fish is reduced to a delusional statistic of numbers caught on the days spent fishing.

At that point there is nothing you can do but wait until the angler hits bottom. The day will come when they can’t catch a fish if it was flopping around in the bottom of their boat.

This will often cause the poor angler to pause and reflect on the pointless nature of their existence. They find themselves wishing they could just catch one fish.

That would be a good day’s fishing.

Endangered species roulette

All I have ever tried to do as a wilderness gossip columnist was to remove the dirty linen from the seamy underbelly of our local endangered species for an intimate view of nature in the raw.

For example, the bull trout is not an endangered species. It is not even a species.

Sure it may be genetically different than a Dolly Varden but you and I are genetically different too. This does not make us different species. We are both tax payers.

The Dolly Varden and the bull trout are both char.

If the Bull trout is endangered, I have often pondered in my career as a professional fishing guide, how come on some days on some rivers, that is all we catch?

If the bull trout are endangered, why are they subjected to a commercial gillnet fishery? If the bull trout are endangered, why does the National Park buy them from the gill net fishery just so the biologists can study the bull trout ear bones?

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to be a biologist. I would work for free if they would just pay for my ammunition and gasoline.

It must be fun to play God with an ecosystem by increasing endangered predators that endanger still more species until the entire system crashes.

The bull trout was aptly named. It has spawned a vast bureaucracy that administers the control of land, water and “public education.”  This “education” does not tell you that the Bull trout have been protected for so long, they are endangering other species.

Last year, more than 100,000 endangered spring chinook smolts were released into the Dungeness River.  Only about 2,700 survived the journey to salt water.

The bull trout along with the other varmints got the rest. Protection of the predatory bull trout limits the reproduction of other species and keeps the Dungeness spring chinook and steelhead in an endangered status limbo of endless studies and no action.

The recent release of the weasel-like fisher is yet another example of this management philosophy. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to ask the locals if they had seen any fishers before they started transplanting more fishers in from British Columbia.

It opened the floodgate of fisher feuds across the North Olympic Peninsula.

A fisher ate a man’s cat on the Lyre River. A fisher got into a chicken house on the Bogachiel.

On the Pysht River a fisher stole a steelhead that some poor guy caught and left on the beach. Other fishers have become endangered species speed bumps while trying to cross U.S. Highway 101.

Inquiring minds want to know, what they should do if they see a fisher in the wilderness. I would advise you not to panic. Stand your ground. Make a large profile. Get out your checkbook.

Each one of these large weasels took more than $8,000 to get here! Your donations are gladly accepted. It’s when you see a fisher near your home that you should panic.

Congratulations, your home is now fisher habitat. You may have an opportunity to become a willing seller like the people who were removed from along the Dungeness once their homes were declared bull trout habitat.

Like the Bull trout, the fisher will be dining on other endangered species, namely the marbled murrelet and the spotted owl. These birds are creatures whose numbers continue to decline despite our best efforts to preserve them.

To paraphrase another fairy tale, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, might not bring back our endangered species again.