March Speaker will be Jack Keading. 

He will show a PBS video,

narrated by Alan Alda, on the building of Bonneville Dam. 

Be sure to be on time as this is a one hour presentation,

and the meeting will start SHARPLY AT 7:PM. 

Please join us at 7 p.m., March 18, 2004 at the Oak Tree

Restaurant in Woodland, WA.

Fish First members mourn the loss of Bill Wiggins. He was an avid fly fisherman and member of Clark Skammania Flyfishers.

Wiggins died from an apparent heart attack after his boat capsized in the East Fork Lewis River, Wednesday, Feb. 25.

Wiggins and fellow member Craig Lynch put in two boats at Lewisville Park to take Fish First members and others on an observation tour of the lower river. Near the County Work Station below Daybreak, Wiggins struggled to maintain control of the boat. It overturned throwing Dick Dyrland, Bob Delk and Wiggins into the water.

Delk and Dyrland swam to shore. Struggling to swim, Wiggins was pulled ashore by Dean Swanson. He passed out shortly after reaching land. Barry Sutherland, NRCS, performed CPR until help arrived.

Wiggins was a retired Battle Ground Schools Principal, taught at the Clark Skammania Flyfishers flyfishing school, tied flys and was a model railroad enthusiast. He will be missed.

OUR VIEWS

Gary Loomis went to Russia to establish an Atlantic salmon sport fishing camp, above the Arctic Circle, on the Kola Peninsula in 1989. Living near the Ponoi River for many days each year, over a five year period, Loomis learned much about the area. He found out the river was over 300 miles long and only had two villages of people living on it. The Krasnoshelie village had 150 people and the Kanevka village had about 50. They were reindeer herders and survived the severe climate on reindeer and moose for commercial harvest.

Fifteen years ago, the Russian economy was in turmoil. People sought work where ever they could. Loomis was able to hire top professional people, biologists and professors from the colleges.

The guides and people who helped him establish the camp were well educated individuals.

"In the evenings, we’d sit around the campfire, visit and talk. We had many good conversations." said Loomis. " Andre Velikaov, a biologist, spoke very good English, and we had lots of talks. We discussed their fish program. We compared the way Russia runs their fishery, with the way the United States runs ours."

After high school graduation, Russian students went to college and took fish biology. Directly after college they would spend three to seven years in the field gaining experience, before going home to Moscow or St. Petersburg or where ever they were from. They had tons and tons of field experience.

In comparison, we educate our fish biology majors in the basics of ‘agriculture or production for commercial harvest’ of fish biology. Our college graduates are hired for hatchery work.

"I told Andre we have hardpan in all of our rivers and it is hard for our wild and native fish to try to dig a redd after 50 or 60 years of logging has scoured our streams. "

He said in his thick Russian dialect, "You believe that 50 to 100 years of logging affected the rivers more than Mother Nature did in the last 50 million years of volcano eruptions, floods, and rivers moving back and forth across the riparian area? It is because you have not left enough wild fish in the streams that the hard pan is there. The fish were not put here for us. They are part of a greater ecological balance. Fish move sediment from on top of the spawning redds to the holes in the rivers, and the next flood will pick sediment up and move it on downstream. Year after year, the fish keep the gravel loose."

"We in Russia believe in "mass spawning.’" He continued. "We put fish traps at the mouths of all of our rivers. The fish traps are usually placed off center of the river. They consist of big steel nets suspended by cables stretched across the waterway. The fish are herded into the trap where they are

counted and either released into the stream or herded into a side pen for slaughter. All the fish are counted before they are allowed to continue upstream. We allow mass spawning so we can have large harvests." said Velikaov.

For instance, if you wanted to mass harvest a 1,000 acre field, would you plant 1,000 acres with seed or would you plant five acres? To get a mass harvest, you would plant 1,000 acres. After the harvest, would you save enough seed to replant the 1,000 acres or enough seed to replant only five acres? Of course, you would save seed to replant 1,000 acres. Here we have only saved enough ‘fish’ seed to plant five acres.

Our problem in the United States is just plain over-harvest. We have over-harvested and decimated our salmon fishery for years and years. We commercially use non-selective gill nets which continue to harvest dwindling stocks of native and wild fish.

The Russians know exactly how many fish they need, so they let that many fish swim through the trap daily, and harvest the excess. They always plant the stream beds with enough ‘seed’ to support the fish harvest.

They believe in mass spawning. There are many, many fish in the stream, laying eggs and fertilizing those eggs. Mass spawning means that eggs are fertilized in the redds. Eggs that aren’t buried deep in the redd, float out, are fertilized, and eventually are wedged between rocks and will hatch.

In the United States, we are likely to have a spawning bed in the stream, every three hundred yards. We know that 40% of the eggs or 60% in bad conditions, drift out of the redd because the spawner can’t get the redd deep enough. Those eggs float down the river and never get fertilized. In Russia, salmon mass spawn the redds and mass spawn the eggs that are displaced and float down the river. The displaced eggs will hatch. They don’t need the redd to survive. After hatching the sack fry burrow into the rocks that surround them and do not emerge

until the sack has dissolved.

Two years ago our commercial fishery caught as many summer-run steelhead as we did up-river Spring Chinook. We needlessly killed 22,000 steelhead that could have been released, if fish traps had been used at the mouths of our rivers. No bi-catch and no incidental killing of salmon is possible with a fish trap. Gill nets and tangle nets are non-selective and kill native and wild fish.

Another thing. Our Pacific salmon is the only fish that immediately upon dieing starts to decay. If you take a dead steelhead and a dead salmon and stake them both side by side in the river and come back in a month, the steelhead will look about like it did when you staked it. The salmon won’t be there. It will have decomposed. The warmer the water, the faster the decomposition. Young salmon fry eat the nutrient remains of the spawned adult fish that die upstream of the redd. Their little bodies are composed of 87% of those nutrients. A stream without carcass nutrients can only support about 13% of the small parr body mass. Without nutrients fry will starve.

The commercial fisherman goes to work about 6:00 p.m. He catches fish and throws them into the bottom of the boat where they lay for 9 to 10 hrs. The fish may see some ice, but they’re not cleaned and the stomach acids work on the fish until they

until they are processed on shore. This is not very good fish.

We need to trap fish at the mouths of our streams. We need to put

a processing barge directly at the fish nets near the trap so the fish can be killed, processed and sold quickly.

This is somewhat the way they process Copper River Salmon. It is high priced because it is a quality product that has been quick processed.

"I actually stayed out all day, catching salmon in the Columbia River, and cleaned it when I came ashore." said Loomis. "When I opened it up to remove the guts, the meat actually started to peel away from the bones." It had already started to decompose in the enzymes created by the fish."

Salmon quality would be best harvested out of a live pen.

Steve Stuart, Friends of Clark Co. was the moderator. He introduced the audience to the speakers and ran the overhead projector.

Gary Loomis spoke about the river as he remembered it , pristine and undammed . He talked about the endangered species in the river and the importance of chum as the food salmon for the other species.

Friends of the East Fork Attorney David T. McDonald explained the process for the proposed HCP, permits, ect. He talked about the FEMA letter of map revision allowing the flood plain line to be moved around the mine site. He explained the Hearing Examiners Hearing and that public input is critical and offered to help anyone who wanted to get something put into the record.

Jack Kaeding showed the public documents that were kept from the record by top DOE and WDFW personnel out of Olympia. Region 5 WDFW supported us by submitting Helicopter Survey Redd Counts and other documents to the Olympia office only to have Jeff Koenings keep them from getting into record.

Dick Dyrland talked about the science of the issues. He has documentation that shows the East Fork as a loosing stream, temperature information that shows lower river lethal temperatures and photo documentation of the river from the 1930’s to the present.

About 80 concerned citizens attended the two hour program. A question and answer period followed the meeting.

The Hearings Examiners Hearing set for Mar. 16 has been postponed until sometime in April because JL Storedahl has applied for a conditional use permit to mine the Daybreak site.