A pilot study this year showed enough promise for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to expand its evaluation of the use of "selective" commercial fishing gear on the Columbia River mainstem in the New Year and beyond.

"Status quo is not an option," WDFW Director Phil Anderson said of Columbia River commercial fishing, which has become more restrictive in recent years in large part because of Endangered Species Act protections for an expansive number of Columbia River basin salmon and steelhead listings.

Commercial gill-nets used to harvest the relatively plentiful hatchery fish also exact a toll wild stocks that are ESA-listed. Harvests now are limited to hold down ESA "impacts" to levels that NOAA Fisheries Service feels can be absorbed without compromising efforts to boost wild populations.

Reviving imperiled salmon and steelhead stocks while boosting a sagging commercial fishing industry will require compromise and change, Anderson said.

"They are dependent on each other," Anderson told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council during its meeting earlier this month in Portland. Anderson joined a discussion/presentation in which agency officials and commercial fishermen explained the past and the desired future of the selective gear testing.

It is hoped that the Council's fish and wildlife program, paid for by the Bonneville Power Administration, will help fund further evaluation of various types of selective commercial fishing gear to determine how efficient they are at catching fish and how well wild mortality can be controlled. Selective fishing calls for using methods that allow wild fish to be released unharmed. Most hatchery steelhead and spring chinook produced in the Columbia River basin, as well as some summer and fall chinook, are marked with a clipped adipose fin.

It is estimated that standard mesh gill-nets cause a post release mortality of 30 percent for steelhead and 30 percent for spring chinook salmon. The estimates for smaller mesh tangle nets are 14.7 percent for spring chinook and 18 percent for steelhead. In the fall the estimated steelhead mortality is 66 percent when gill-nets with 8-inch mesh are deployed and 59 percent with 9-inch mesh. Some would dispute those mortality level estimates but all agree there is mortality.

WDFW officials envision a future in which the river's commercial fishers could catch considerably more fish than they do now while helping boost wild fish productivity. The use of gear that causes little mortality would allow the harvest of more hatchery fish within the ESA impact limits and help control the number of hatchery fish that inevitably stray onto spawning grounds. Too much mixing of hatchery and wild fish is believed to reduce the fitness of the naturally produced stocks.

The shift to selective fishing gears could well provide "more fish for the market as well as make a contribution to conservation" of listed stocks, Guy Norman, director of the WDFW's Southwest Region, said.

The state agency started toward the goal of developing a comprehensive research plan by forming a work group that included commercial fishermen, fish buyers, gear providers and other industry representatives to discuss what gear should be tested and how a pilot study would be structured. The agencies own fishery scientists were also consulted, according to the WDFW's Patrick Frazier, who is project manager.

The state tested three selective gear types – purse and beach seines and a floating trap. All corral fish while leaving them free-swimming. Once contained, fish can be identified and released by type or species with a minimum amount of handling.

The WDFW pilot study was conducted this late summer-early fall targeting tule fall chinook and early-run coho in the lower Columbia using the same purse seine boat, Dreamcatcher, used by the Colville Tribes this year in ongoing tests of selective gear on the mid-Columbia and Okanogan rivers. The boat was specifically outfitted for the tribes.

Overall, "the purse seine was certainly the most effective," Frazier said. The purse seine netted as many as 132 salmon and steelhead in a day, though that was by far the highest total in the 14 purse seine outings. Next in effectiveness was the beach seine, followed by the floating trap, which performed better as time went by as the fishermen learned the nuances of catching fish with that type of gear.

All of the gears were deployed successfully in terms of eliminating direct mortality of released fish.

The entrapped fish were "lively and very fresh, with no marks," Frazier said of the fish condition. "You would not believe what these fish look like when they come out of the nets. They were gorgeous."

That could come in handy if the fishers try to gain the market, and prices earned there, for fish that have grown to maturity in the wild, as opposed to the farmed fish that dominate most markets.

"The value of the fish may go up" as a result of the more benign selective methods, Frazier. And they will likely need those higher prices, and greater numbers of fish. The cost of switching to the selective methods will make it harder to make such pursuits economically feasible.

Purse seining, of course, would require commercial fishers to buy new, specially equipped boats. Switching to beach seining or using floating traps would also require the purchase of new equipment, though not new boats.

Also economically daunting is the fact that operating a purse seine can require a crew of up to four or five. And the purse seine and floating also require more than one person to operate. Most gill-net fishermen operate solo.

Fisherman Marty Kuller noted that adding payroll means increasing insurance costs as well.

"But, if we can catch enough fish" to make the selective methods economically feasible, it would create jobs on the boats and on shore.

He was among the commercial fishermen recruited to operate the experimental gear.

Anderson commended the fishermen for "taking on the challenge of changing the way they fish" in order, potentially, to maintain the economic viability of fishing communities and the fishing culture itself.

Fisherman Brian Tarabochia, who tested the floating trap, said fishermen don't necessarily want to change tactics, but that it might be necessary. He said he found it interesting to learn on the job with the trap and eventually begin catching fish.

"It was pretty rewarding, to take it from nothing to something" even though the effort probably penciled out to something less than minimum wage. Tarabochia said about 350 man hours were invested over the four-week period of floating trap testing.

Frazier said the agency and commercial fishing work group continue to work to develop a comprehensive research strategy, which would ideally be completed early next year. It will involve additional testing of the three gears tested this year, and possibly others.

He said it would take at the very least 3 to 5 more years of testing, as well as economic analysis, before selective commercial fisheries could be launched on the lower Columbia.

And it will take money. This year's pilot study was carried out with a $200,000 grant from the Pacific Coastal Salmon Restoration Fund. But expanded research would require funding. As an example the agency would like to advertise for bids from fishermen to carry out next year's gear tests. That would involve outfitting them.

"The dollars to move forward on this is why we're here today," Frazier told the Council. He said he WDFW is investigating all potential funding sources, including the PCSRF, the Council and possibly some sort of slice of the Mitchell Act funding pie. Mitchell Act funding has historically been spent on hatchery production activities

"There is a group of fishers who are interested in doing this," Frazier said while acknowledging not all of the gill-netters are on board.

Hobe Kytr of Salmon For All said that many of the gill-netters remain wary of making the large investments that a switch would require without guarantees that they would indeed be able to harvest larger numbers of fish.