Trolling with gill nets

I thought the article by Dylan Darling about this years salmon run on the Trinity was well written. It seemed fair and informative. If only the editor, who put the title "Are gill nets decimating Klamath and Trinity salmon runs?", HAD ACTUALLY READ IT!

"It's a late run so they are still coming," he said

 

"It is not a crash situation," he said. "... there has been misinterpretation of that data."

"The bottom line is the Trinity River is going to have an OK run," Sinnen said, "but not a real robust one."

Dylan's article seemed to focus on the accusations posted on the website usafishing.com, written by Mike Aughney, 48, of Petaluma. Dylan investigates these accusations by interviewing those that have a differing view, from where the quotes above came from.

The evidence provided in the article doesn't support what the article headline would have us believe. Even the writing of Mike Aughney actually makes a case that the harvest levels are the culprit. Gill nets are just a technique of harvesting salmon. It's the number of fish that are being taken is what is important. If the Record Searchlight wants to really know if the Klamath salmon runs are being decimated, they should be asking how and why harvest levels are set or is it just a WAG (wild ass guess, as Mike Aughney puts it).

To put this issue into a larger context, and the reason why I think the headline was so ill chosen, is the fact that the water in the Trinity River has been a contentious issue since before the laws that established the Reservations in the 1800's. And today, with pressure from the State of California to provide water for the health of the Sacramento River and Delta fisheries in which new, sweeping legislation is sitting on the governor's desk , as well as pressure being exerted by a well organized national Tea Party Patriot campaign, which is also supported by Redding's Tea Party Patriot group, to frame this debate as environmentalist vs. farm families from the San Juaquin Valley.

The Yurok and the Hoopa Valley Tribes and their salmon have primary water rights to the Trinity and Klamath Rivers with an obligation from the U.S. government to not do anything detrimental to the fisheries.

For the Record Searchlight to attempt to focus on a particular, traditional fishing method without questioning the science behind harvest limits has only been successful in fomenting inflammatory rhetoric as shown in the comments it provoked at a time where facts are what's needed, not headlines from a troll.