Home – Puget Sound Anglers State Board

State Board Presidents Message for April.
How is Washington state going to keep fishing when we have the animal rights groups doing their best to shut down hunting and fishing in our great state. They are flooding the Governor’s office to reinstate their candidates that Governor Ferguson just removed Inslee’s going out the door, two candidates. We have been fighting off preservationist fisheries organizations for a long time. PSA and 3 tribes started a hatchery coalition to fight for our fishing and fisheries. We came together in a hearing in Olympia in 2014 when senator Kirk Pearson became the chair of Senate Natural Resources. He was my senator and we talked often about the fisheries on how to fix them and who was trying to kill them.
The hearing was over Wild Fish Conservancy suing to shut down the Snoqualmie Tokul Creek Steelhead hatchery. We had three tribes there. Lummi, Tulalip, and Upper Skagit. Their message was the same as ours. For the most part. Hatcheries are the only thing keeping our fisheries alive. I spoke with Randy Kinley, Fisheries Manager for the Lummi Nation and Ray Fryberg of the Tulalip tribes in the hallway after. We were so aligned! We followed up with each other afterword. They brought the tribal side and I brought out the nontribal side of issues, we put everything on the table to look at and figure out how to fix things. From there we established a working relationship and started a Hatchery Coalition. Lummi, Tulalip, Upper Skagit, and PSA. We now were able to work both side of fisheries and bring up issues that we could work on from both sides. I cannot ever tell some of the things that the tribes have done for us as the issues are behind close doors and us not being federal could not every get there. This is what building relationships is all about.
I am also a member of the Billy Frank Jr. Salmon Coalition. Here you have to agree to three things to be on it. 1. Fix the habitat. 2. Increase hatchery production. 3. Manage pinnipeds (seals and sea lions.
Many of you are learning of what we are doing. We used to fight over the fish with tribes and now we are fighting together to save our hatcheries from the preservationist groups. Its important for you to know that we are always being attacked from those Preservationist Conservationist. The Wild Fish People would rather have rivers die than have hatchery fish in them. There are no wild fish left. Just mixed stocks of remnants of the fish. When do we just start using the best available broodstock in the rivers and start hatching them to help them make the spawn as many of our eggs never make it to spawn. Eggs get flushed down the rivers in floods. Just think if we could stop all hatcheries and production closures. Its time to rewrite the salmon papers. There is no money in recovered salmon, only in the restoration process. If we recover salmon, there is no money in it for the “Salmon Recovery Industry!” Join your local PSA Chapter and help us recover salmon in a realistic manor.

· Ron Garner President PSA