news story / By Ryan Burns

By the Gills

Sport fishermen accuse tribes of bogarting the fall salmon run

(Nov. 12, 2009)  As the fall salmon run on the Klamath and Trinity rivers draws to a close, a small group of sport fishermen and guides has been casting allegations into the teeming waters of the Internet, claiming that gill nets employed by the Yurok and Hoopa Valley tribes are systematically decimating the fragile fish population by ensnaring all but a measly, undersized few. They say the nets, which snag fish by the gills as they attempt to escape, are jeopardizing not only their livelihoods but the health of fisheries up and down the coast for years to come.

Tribe members, meanwhile, dismiss the charges as baseless, saying these commercial fishermen are ill-informed at best, and, at worst, dishonest and racially motivated.

Gill net buoys on the Lower Trinity River in a photo posted on www.usafishing.com. Photo courtesy of Mike Aughney

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Commercial fishing guide Mike Aughney has been leading the anti-gill net campaign from his own Web site, www.usafishing.com. For more than a month, Aughney has been lamenting the dearth of salmon on the lower Trinity, citing as evidence the experiences of commercial fishermen and guides like himself as well as low fish counts at the Willow Creek weir, a collection site monitored by state scientists.

“It’s tough enough the salmon have to make it through one gauntlet on the Lower Klamath,” Aughney wrote in reference to the Yurok gill nets, “but it’s the second set of nets at the Hoopa reservation that are inflicting the biggest toll.”

On Oct. 22, investigative agents with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Fisheries Service responded to an anonymous tip that a Bay Area grocery store chain was selling Klamath River salmon with telltale gill net markings. NOAA Fisheries Supervisor Tan Torquemada said via e-mail last week that this was suspicious.

“We were aware that the Yurok tribal commercial season had been closed for over a week, and became concerned that the fish had been unlawfully harvested under current Yurok fishing regulations,” he said. Investigators learned that a total of 20,000 pounds of salmon had been sold and distributed among the chain’s 20 Bay Area locations. Aughney believed this was the smoking gun. However, the salmon turned out to be from the Hoopa Valley Tribe, which, unlike the Yurok, does not prohibit its members from the commercial sale of their state-sanctioned allotment of subsistence fish. (Such a ban used to exist, but the tribe repealed it in 1989.)

“That’s the rub, the Catch-22,” said NOAA Fisheries Special Agent Tim Broadman. “You have to have a regulation that’s being violated.” NOAA Fisheries has authority to prosecute tribes under the federal Lacey Act, which prohibits the sale of illegally acquired fish, but since the Hoopa Valley Tribe has no law against selling subsistence fish, the agency has no jurisdiction in this case. In fact, the transaction was not illegal.

Nevertheless, Aughney believes the current system, in which tribes regulate their own fisheries, allows for corruption and dishonesty. He claims tribes have been stringing gill nets across the entire width of the river, a violation of regulations in both tribes. “When [tribal police] have NOAA observers on board, all the illegal activity stops for a couple hours while the principal walks down the hall, so to speak,” Aughney said by phone last week. “And as soon as he goes back in his office, it’s wide-open recess again.” He suggested switching to the type of sonar counting system used in numerous Alaska fisheries.

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