Hatchery steelhead have really come into the spotlight over the past few years, with more emphasis on "saving" our wild gene stocks. I'm not really sure where I stand on this whole issue, as a guide I'm never in favor of less fish, in other words decrease, or in some cases, terminate the release of thousands of hatchery fish in an "attempt" to save a few so called wild fish, BUT, one of my favorite steelhead streams this time of year has no hatchery fish at all, its all about catching and releasing big wild fish.
Over the years I've heard many opinions and rumors about where our fisheries will be in the future, one such rumor now is there will be no more hatchery steelhead as of 2017, unless the river has or can implement a brood stock program, in other words hatchery fish that were live spawned from wild parents, and yet those of us who live to fish steelhead remember the thriving brood stock program on the Olympic Peninsula that was terminated without a justifiable reason, so who knows where the truth lies.
Hatchery steelhead in the state of Washington are in most cases a terminal fishery, in other words put there only to be harvested by anglers. To give anglers more advantage of harvesting hatchery steelhead some systems such as the Cowlitz River and the Kalama River have a recycle program, meaning when hatchery steelhead come back from the ocean to spawn, if they are not caught, or "harvested", when they reach the hatchery from where they were raised they are collected in a pen, loaded up into a truck, driven downstream and realeased to make another journey upstream past anglers attempting to catch them again. On the Kalama River if a fish is able to make the journey several time without ending up being tagged on a catch record card, they are again loaded up into a truck and removed from the system entirely to places like Kres Lake in Kalama where they spend their remaining days swimming around the edge of the lake looking for some way to escape this HELL they've been dropped into, at this point their best hope is they WILL be caught.
Raising the limit of hatchery steelhead on the Kalama is nothing more than another attempt to remove hatchery fish from the system to protect the wild gene pool that show up this time of year to spawn, apparently there are studies to support the idea that hatchery steelhead are a weaker strain of fish that if left in the system to spawn with wild fish it will pollute the wild genes, thus threatening the future of our wild steelhead...WHO KNOWS, all I have to say on that is QUINAULT.
I think most of us will agree our steelhead fishery is under threats from all sides, but consider this, with recent record returns on salmon, maybe the steelheads demise will be that they are listed as a game fish,
