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A friend passed along the current week's "Hot Sheet". In this is a report on gillnetting on the Klamath and Trinty Rivers and the impact to the current year's runs. Tragic news for these fragile fisheries.
"Trinity and Klamath River Reports from Mike Aughney
Tribal gillnets are literally wiping out the entire 2009 Trinity salmon
run. It's bad enough the salmon have to make it through one gauntlet on
the Lower Klamath but it's the second set of nets at the Hoopa
reservation that in inflicting the biggest toll on the percentage of
fish making their way to the spawning grounds.
For the week ending October 21st only 26 salmon were counted at the
Willow Creek weir on the main stem Trinity. But it gets worse. At a
time of year that should be the peak of the run with 100s of fish
making it through daily only 86 adult king salmon have been counted at
the Willow Creek weir since October 1st.
86 salmon in three weeks on a major river system? What a pathetic
count.
We received reports on Tuesday from an "insider" at Hoopa who counted
45 nets in the river along the reservation. None were being attended
and the word from this insider was that counts of as high as 85 salmon
per net were taken that day. Some of the nets are completely across the
river allowing ZERO escapement.
With individual tribal nets taking more salmon in a single day than the
entire past three week's escapement is a travesty. Tribal gillnetting
is wiping out the run before our eyes and yet no one from the tribes,
Fish and Game, USFWS, or PFMC are batting an eye. The only ones who are
raising the alarm are being ignored, local sport anglers and guides.
Even if the state or the feds did step in at this point the damage has
been done. The lower salmon escapement goal for the Trinity will fall
some 90% short this year and come 2012 we will again see no or low in
river quotas and closures along the Cal and Oregon coasts. The Yurok's
and Hoopa's do a great job at pretending to be "stewards of the river"
when in fact their non traditional netting practices are doing far more
harm to this fishery than the dams. Come 2012 there are sure to be
tribal members out there claiming how they can't "fed their poor" or
how the dams have "ruined their traditional fisheries". The truth will
be that there won't be enough salmon returning to support any take....
sport, tribal or other because tribal gillnets had raped the river
clean years prior. The truth is in the numbers and we are working on a
story that will show that tribal gillnetting has been one of the
biggest factors, larger than dams to the demise of the Klamath and
Trinity fisheries."
“Those who are most aware of the declining health of natural systems
must be the ones to sound the alarm. They must be willing to take a
stand. Some biologists are reluctant to vigorously defend sound
practices in the treatment of the earth because they feel that their
jobs, funding, and perhaps even their lives may be threatened, as
indeed they may. Even so, if those who understand freshwater [or
other] systems best, and are most aware of their inestimable value to
mankind are not to be advocates, then there will be little effective
advocacy."
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