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Calendar for April
3 Whidbey Island
General Meeting 10 Renton
General Meeting
10 Sno-King General Meeting
16 Fidalgo - San
Juan Islands General Meeting
Brandon Werner
Project manager for the current culvert replacement projects on the peninsula.
?? Eastside
General Meeting
24 Save Our Fish
Ocean
Anglers General Meeting
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Check us out Facebook 
We teamed up with tribes years ago to save salmon. We agreed to three things to be on the Billy Frank
Jr. Salmon Coalition. 1. Rebuild the habitat. 2. Agree for increased hatchery production. 3. Deal with the
seals and sea lion predators on salmon.
We see very clearly with tribes eye to eye on these issues. We have launched a campaign to deal with
this. If you are rebuilding habitat, you have to keep the salmon around long enough to use this habitat
when its repaired. We are still tearing up habitat faster than we are rebuilding it. We were just on King 5
about us coming together and the Seattle Times did an article too. Q13 has one coming. This is about
working together to restore salmon.
Last year we had great fish returns and could not catch them because we have no tool in the tool box to
update the size of the PS salmon runs. Most don’t know in the Puget Sound, it was decided to take
Chinook and Coho away from commercials and give them to the sports fishers, no one looked further
down the road as what this could cause. We have an HSRG tool called pHOS that is built into many river’s
HGMPs (Hatchery and Genetic Management Plans). They are the blueprint on what you can do to in that
river and how much hatchery production can be released. This tool says that if you have too high of ratio
of hatchery fish on the spawning beds, then you must cut production because you do not have tools to
weed out the hatchery fish. Hook and line angling is not efficient enough to catch the amount needed.
We have no way to update fishery returns as the commercials were the tools to gauge this. So we are
stuck having to set fisheries off of forecasts only. When the run comes in bigger, We don’t get more fish
to catch. This is just the way it is.
In many talks with NOAA, we have been told that we can make as many fish as we want as long as we
catch them all. 2023 was one of the best fishing returns in probably 20 years. When we had
commercials, they could measure the run and we could update it so we could keep fishing. Tribes could
not catch enough of them by themselves so pHOS cut hatchery production. ESA hit the scene and HSRG
followed shortly after. While its meant to fix the naturally spawning fish returns, it did the opposite.
We need to get the HSRG language out of the HGMPs so we can make more fish. As of now we have
these huge rain storms every year when our chinook come back to spawn. These almost yearly 60-year
floods come and wash 99% of the eggs down the river. Join PSA and help us fix our fisheries. We are
fighting for our kids, grandkids, and yours too!
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