Moratorium mumbo jumbo

It was another tough week in the news. 

Fisheries managers announced plans for a fishing moratorium on the Elwha River and all of its tributaries starting next fall. The proposal is part of the Elwha Dam removal project that is scheduled for completion in 2014. 

The Elwha dams removal is the largest such project in U.S. history. It is a grand experiment that will attempt to restore all five species of Pacific salmon along with steelhead, bull trout and sea run cutthroat by removing the dams and allowing the fish access to 70 miles of pristine spawning and rearing habitat within Olympic National Park. 

It has been estimated that the Elwha River once supported a historic population of 400,000 fish. It is thought that the Elwha now supports only 3000 salmon. 

The proposed fishing moratorium is an attempt to rebuild runs of fish that have been blocked from the upper Elwha and its tributaries for 100 years.

Of all the tributaries of the Elwha, Indian Creek could have been the most important small stream in the watershed. In prehistoric times there was a S'Klallam village located at the mouth of Indian Creek at its confluence with the Elwha. Indian Creek was noted for its runs of steelhead, a sea-run rainbow trout and blue backs. That is a popular name for the sockeye salmon. 

The sockeye have always been valued for their beauty and the quality of their blood-red flesh. Sockeye generally run up rivers that have a lake where the adults can spawn and the juveniles can spend the first year of their lives. As the sockeye run upstream to their spawning grounds their appearance changes from the blue backs and silver bellies of an ocean fish to a spawner with a red body, a green head and a hooked nose.  

John Sutherland, a Hudson's Bay trapper who was the first European to discover the lake he named for himself, observed red salmon spawning in November. We can assume these were sockeye. 

Once the Elwha dams were built the Indian Creek sockeye, steelhead and village disappeared. 

With the removal of the dams, it is hoped that the steelhead and sockeye will return to Lake Sutherland.  That's the motive for the proposed sport fishing moratorium in the lake. 

To observe the effects of a sport-fishing moratorium on salmon restoration we have only to look at the Elwha's nearest neighbor the Dungeness River to see what we are in for. 

Like the Elwha, the Dungeness is a river that once supported hundreds of thousands of the five species of salmon. 

Unlike the Elwha, the Dungeness has no dam to blame for making the fish threatened or endangered. 

Back in the '90s the Dungeness River was closed to sport fishing for most of the year as a conservation measure. Who could argue with that? We had the assurance that once the runs were rebuilt we could fish again. 

Ten years after, instead of rebuilding the runs of fish on Dungeness, the government has invested their millions buying waterfront real estate, while allowing a commercial gillnet fishery to continue at the mouth of the river.  Meanwhile, homes along the Dungeness River have been declared bull trout habitat. 

They are routinely purchased from willing sellers, razed and replaced with native vegetation without one fish to show for it.  

The sport-fishing moratorium on the Dungeness is a failed experiment.  Normally, conducting a failed experiment while expecting different results fits Einstein’s' definition of insanity. Here on the Olympic Peninsula we call it salmon restoration. 

Those who ignore history probably don't fish.

Thanks God for rain

Say what you want about all the rain we have had lately but we need it. High water in the rivers cleans the gravel where the salmon spawn.  A flood washes more gravel down the river in soft beds that are easy digging for the salmon to build their nests in. 

The rain acts like a filter in the atmosphere giving us some of the purest air on the planet.  Living on the Olympic Peninsula, we tend to take clean air and water for granted, that is until it’s gone.

 You can go without water for a few days but we will not last long without air.

The American Lung Association says that 64,000 Americans die prematurely every year from breathing polluted air. That might be just another meaningless national statistic until you watch it happen to a friend firsthand.

He had kicked cancer but, as the old saying goes, “You should have seen his foot.” Beating cancer gave him pneumonia. Things did not look good.   He wanted to go fishing. Maybe it was part of what they call the bucket list since he was due to kick it at any time.

He traveled with a van load of oxygen bottles but he said he didn’t need one that morning. The air was clean and he was breathing fine. We were going fishing.

We launched on the Hoh River on one of those fall mornings when the sky was blue and crystal clear.

We caught a big bright silver right off the bat.  I was taking a picture of my friend with his fish when I noticed a small white cloud on a distant ridgetop. It was no big deal at the time but along about noon the cloud had turned brown and ugly.

It sank into the valley and turned the air into a blue haze. We found ourselves under a thick blanket of a toxic fog of burning stumps, plastic and earth that soon had my friend choking to near death.

We got off the river. He never came back.

Within a day the smoke of this and many other fires had traveled east to cover the high Olympics. Standing on a peak on the upper Dungeness you could get a hazy view of Seattle, swathed in a brown cloud of smoke that a temperature inversion had trapped in the Puget Sound Basin. 

Seattle was suffering from air pollution. It was just lucky they had no idea where it came from. They would have blamed the loggers.

Before you blame loggers for air pollution remember, you are reading this in a newspaper made of wood in a house made of wood. We need wood and besides, our forests have been catching on fire ever since they started growing, sometime after the last Ice Age. 

Once we started logging the slash or leftovers of the operation would catch on fire and burn entire watersheds.  Controlled slash burns are part of an effort to keep the rest of the woods from catching on fire. Large piles of wood waste are routinely covered with plastic to keep them dry, then ignited with a variety of fossil fuels.

Fires are an inevitable part of the forest ecology whether there are loggers involved. 

Would you like the fires out in the open where they pollute an entire region? Or in a biomass facility that filters the pollution out of the atmosphere?

It is not a perfect solution but this is not a perfect world. It is a choice that we can make.

Until then, thank God for the rain.

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.