Northwest Fishing Reports

Before I begin, let me place a caveat. If this topic is already being discussed elsewhere please point me to the thread and I will happily abandon this one.

That being said, has anyone looked through the recently proposed updates to the Puget Sound freshwater rules on the Snohomish, Sky and Wallace? They are available at the link below.

http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/regulations/ ... %20WAC.PDF

Unless I am reading them incorrectly or totally missing something, it appears that they are proposing limiting salmon fishing to Pink years only for most of the entire river system. I will admit that the way the proposal is written is hard to understand, but for instance, if you look at the Sky it basically notes that Chinook are open every year, but that other areas are open to salmon only on "odd" years. The same wording appears in regulations for the Snohomish and Wallace. Unless they plan to do year-by-year opening assessments, which even then does not bode well for opportunity in the future, it looks like huge changes may be coming for the entire system.

It looks to me like the rules you have linked to are only the rule changes where the emergency rules are incorporated into the official rules for adoption for the current season. I could be wrong - but I see every body of water that closes as of October 31 is just crossed out in the document you link to - unless they really are proposing to close dozens (hundreds?) of tributaries to fishing permanently, I think that is what this means.

Yea, I figured that one possibility could be that it was just updated to reflect this year, however, I do know that the rules I linked to are not temporary "emergency" style proposals. This is what the WDFW is actually proposing going forward with under their three year rule simplification plan, and perhaps this is just the odd year version. Also all of the rivers that are crossed out would actually still be open by default. Under the new proposal all rivers and streams are OPEN unless listed otherwise, which is a big departure from the current rule set which says they are all CLOSED unless listed otherwise. Of course, they still impose many of the same restrictions that already exist, but it just means that by default they are all open from the Saturday before Memorial Day until October 31st unless noted otherwise, which is pretty nice. Just for game fish though I am thinking, which doesn't include salmon. Anyway, thanks for your input.

I might as well go ahead and post the link to where all of this information is stored by WDFW.

http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/regulations/rule_proposals/

If you follow the link and click on "Comment on Policy Proposals" you can read through some sort of generic updates that the WDFW proposed a couple months ago. However, if you click on "Comment on Rule Proposals" you can read through the real details of what they are proposing. I would encourage anyone who fishes regularly to review their proposals and submit comments if you have questions or concerns. These aren't emergency rules, these are proposed permanent changes.

When would these rules go into effect? 2019?

I don't remember if there was a set date these would go into effect. If I remember correctly this was part of their rules "simplification" process.