I have an inside line on the situation with the Lower Quinault. I know the guide and count him among my friends and see him as an upstanding individual and professional. He has guided spey anglers in the past, Trey Coombs among them, you may look for his article on this in the next copy of The Drake for more information. The guide is motivated to set a new standard for sport fishing on the Lower Quinualt. He sees spey angling as something that he can pass down to his children and others in the tribe. This is new territory for this river, him, and the tribe. He would like to see a paradigm shift in the direction of sport fishing here.
Will the nets come out? Well not likely as this is one man doing what he feels right for his business, family, and personal well being. I personally have never seen him kill an unclipped fish. There is a long standing opposition between conservation minded anglers and the tribe as far as the management practices here, on the Queets, and Chehalis Basin. I for one do not see the nets coming out of any of these streams any time soon. However, I am not going to hold it against an individual who I feel is making positive steps for the health of the resource, his family, and his people. I think this is an excellent opportunity to foster a more cooperative relationship rather than oppositional one concerning these issues.
As far as the river itself and angling pressure goes I can say that angling pressure is extremely light. There is 40 miles of river on this stream alone and I have never seen any more than 3-4 boats at a time in any launch location and generally zero. There is no one fly fishing despite the river is seemingly made for it. Most of the river is walking speed runs with larger boulders and rapids peppered in for good measure. It is a beautiful place and I must say lacks much of the logging scars that most or our non-tribal rivers are riddled with. As far as his partnership with The Evening Hatch goes it serves the purposes of getting the word out about this unique situation.
What???
This is a nice idea but it isn't accurate at all. "most of the river is walking speed runs with larger boulders" what section were you on???! Having seen the lower quinault, I can say that it isn't full of boulder strewn beautiful fly runs, quite to the contrary. Much of it looks like the lower snohomish or snoqualmie, steep sloughed off banks that drop off into the river with massive root wads along it. It also is not free of logging scars. The upper river is (being in national park), but below the lake (the tribal portion) the river is logged nearly into the riparian, and wide open clear cuts are visible from about half the runs on the river. As for light pressure, the one launch I was at had 7 boat trailers with tribal guides on it. Light I suppose compared to many of the OP streams during peak season, but considering there were 10 other boats on other sections of river, I wouldn't say it was completely under-fished.
That said, I think you have a very strong point. Most of the guys that go to fish the Quinault choose to fish it because they can abuse it: treble hooks, any bait, barbs, and any fish, even wild fish, are fair game for killing. I caught a wild fish there and (of course) released it, and the guide I fished with said that was the first time he had seen any of his clients release a chrome wild fish. But he said that many tribal guides prefer not to kill big beautiful wild fish, it's just what clients come there for. If a guide happens to have clients that want to CNR, that's exactly what they'll do. If they want to swing single barbless flies, I think most guides would accommodate that. So if the guides out there realize they can make 500-600 per day sitting in the boat relaxing while fly guys swing runs (evening hatch is asking 700), versus breathing in four stroke fumes pulling plugs to help a few jerk offs that fish with no ethics bonk wild fish for 400 dollars, I bet most of them will prefer the former...
The fish that in the section of the Quinault where they are being targeted by sports fisherman have already somehow (miraculously) made it past the nets. Whether they end up in some dickhead's freezer, or on a redd spawning in the upper river is really up to the client. If some guy wants to take out exclusively CNR spey fishers, more power to him.
I don't agree with a lot of the tribe's management policies, treating hatchery fish and wild fish as inter-changable being the biggest one. I also don't think that netting the shit out of them is a great idea. That said, ******, by way of the WDFW, has done a pretty lousy job of managing every other salmon and steelhead bearing river in this state. We still have catch and kill sports fisheries for wild steel on the OP, we still log the shit out of most of these watersheds, we've managed to dam into oblivion the single greatest steelhead and chinook river history has ever known (the columbia) not to mention introduce non-native species to many of our better fisheries. Who are you (meaning non-tribal sport fishermen)to cast any judgement on the tribes when you can't even manage to make the OP catch and release for wild fish??? If ******'s start to hold up their end of the bargain, like managing habitat, catch and release, removing all the dams, getting rid of our own hatcheries, and really being true advocates for wild steelhead, maybe then we can start to judge the tribe, but in the meantime we are still just the pot calling the kettle black. There aren't a lot of employment opportunities is Taholah, Washington, or anywhere in that part of the peninsula, and commercial fishing is a big part of their traditional way of life as well as income. It's not going anywhere, regardless of sports fishing.
Say whatever you want about the tribe, but their lousy management still has the best returns of wild steelhead in the state. Why don't we do something about the fisheries we
can manage instead of bitching about the way somebody else is handling the one we can't...?