The New Coastal Regulations

Doug Rose has a great commentary up about the recent closures on the west end rivers over at His Blog. I completely agree with what he says. I want to take a second to talk about the impact on the Quinault with these closures. In the pamphlet it sites impact on salmon smolts as the reason for the closures, and only streams listed can be fished. Cook creek is the ONLY stream listed on the lower Quinault. Now, I should note that of all the coastal rivers, the Quinault is perhaps the least impacted by this regulation because of the large portion of its drainage inside the Olympic National Park and the Quinault Indian Reservation. This still manages to close my favorite creek, the place where I caught my first fish without parental supervision, even though all of the creek that is located within the jurisdiction of the WDFW is separated from the lower stem by a dry section for roughly 9 months of the year, and about a mile from the state/reservation line there is an impassable waterfall. These two natural barriers create a stream that does not support any Salmon and no Sea-Run Cutthroat and even if it did, logging activity has degraded a vast majority of spawning ground. A small number of steelhead make it up to state land, and admittedly there are a number of steelhead smolts that call the pools all the way to falls home, but this stream hosts one of the best resident cutthroat and rainbow populations in the entire drainage due to its natural barriers. These fish receive little pressure, in fact the only other people I've ever encountered on this creek were local kids going swimming. Meanwhile, the upper Quinault hosts considerable amounts of juvenile salmonoids of every species that calls this drainage home. In addition, this time of year holds no salmon fishery, a very small resident cutthroat fishery, and a few early summer steelhead in the upper river. The fish it has in abundance right now are the native char, Dolly Varden and ESU listed Bull Trout, that make their yearly spawning run in June both from the Lake and the Pacific. The upper river remains wide open under the new regulations. Is this the logic our lawmakers follow? Completely close, even to catch and release, streams with little potential for anadromous fish production, but leave wide open, even to wild harvest, a portion of the river where ESU listed fish are currently spawning? Doesn't make sense to me.