President Message
State Board President message for February
Lets hope we have a great fishing year for 2026. Coastal Razor Clamming was great to end 2025 and to start 2026. Took grand daughters down to Westport to clam which they just love doing. Our PSA Sno-King members came down too. It was great as my wife made a big pot of clam chowder for all of us and others brought food for a small potluck. There are more clam digs to come.
Had a meeting on shellfish with our WDFW shellfish group and the spot shrimp test fishery for eastern area 9 did not show any improvement on finding more shrimp. They did not find more shrimp or smaller ones either. No one is sure what is going on. Not good. Hopefully whatever causes this, passes. The Strait and San Juans however were great on their biomass. There will be restricted areas and seasons.
All of you have seen the massive floods we had this winter. This is going to cause havoc 3-4 years down the road, as I am pretty sure many of our salmon egg beds got washed away. So I would say fish hard for the next few years. Keep this in mind that the returning fish will be hatchery fish as they were protected in the hatcheries. Bring this up with the environmental groups saying that the hatcheries are hurting the natural returning stocks.
We need to switch our hatchery systems from segregated to integrated. In other words, start using the best natural broodstock in the rivers, in the hatcheries. This way we are reproducing the strongest natural origin stocks to carry the fish returns. This could take away some of the lawsuits on our hatcheries too. But to touch that low abundance broodstock will certainly be a lawsuit too. But we cannot keep going the way we are. With the floods that we just went through I think we have a case against this as the natural spawning fish are being wiped out by floods and changing environmental conditions and also still losing our habitat to urban sprawl.
Make plans to get those kids and grandkids out to enjoy our natural resources, whether it is crab, shrimp, clamming, and bottom fishing where it is open, along with salmon. Join your local PSA chapter as we put our money where our mouth is. We have salmon pens that we grow smolts and release them to be caught. Hope we see you at the Puyallup and Seattle Boat show.
Join your local PSA chapter.
ยท Ron Garner President PSA