**Do you agree or disagree with Buzz??? Comment Below**
The 4 lower Snake River Dams.
Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite
This contention has been going on for a long-time, but it seems that momentum is building. Buzz Ramsey, longtime tackle rep for Luhr Jensen, Yakima Bait & Pure Fishing to name a few, is passionate about this subject. Listen as he details his opinions on the best way to improve smolt to adult ratio on salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River basin.
Though there is fish passage, the reservoirs created by those dams warm temperatures and make the journey less safe from predators like birds and other fish.
By opening up the lower Snake, it would bring massive economic growth not just in those areas of the river, but it would also benefit the entire lower basin by lowering temperatures for lower river fish. There is opposition from irrigation, farming, barging and tourist ship industries. They have valid concerns, but the plan that Rep. Simpson is bringing will allocate money to create new opportunities for them to continue to flourish.
What are your thoughts? Comment below.
11 comments
Do you realize the tribes fork over 80 percent of the funds, according to a National fish hatchery, above Bonneville. So…i understand the “White Man,”below Bonneville, which is far more than all the natives above Bonneville.
I moved here 33 years ago i live in Vancouver Washington ive fished the rivers from naselle to the klick the real problem is we have killed the wild lower columbia strains due to gill netting greed will continue to delete the runs so the obvious way to have a fishery is make netters biuld and maintain hatcheries to support their greed and maybe sport fishing will be open more than a week
From the late 1990s until the last few years we had amazing runs on the Grande Ronde. Daily catch numbers and excess returns led to increased keep limits. Since the big push to protect “native” runs hatcheries began to close and fewer smolts were released. Then the practice of trucking the smolts around the dams stopped and they began flushing them over dams nstead causing thousands of fish to die from nitrogen poisoning. How many posts have you seen of someone playing tug of war with a seal and a fish on the line? These mammals are consuming salmon, steelhead and sturgeon, swimming far up the Columbia. They don’t belong there and yet they are still protected. Taking out dams will take out one of the cleanest forms of electricity, something we need right now. Face it, it’s been a change of practices and politics that’s caused this. That’s what needs to change.
Let’s get the gillnets out of the Columbia. . Let’s kill less salmon .restrict sport fishing more .gillnets should not be in the river . Try that before destroying the four dams that provide a huge benefit for the region. If the gillnets don’t come out, then no one is serious about saving the salmon
Yup, time to rethink the native gill net decision. Native Americans have double dipped this society, utilizing western medicine, western building, and thousands of “capitalist” systems. But somehow we still let them gill net, killing thousands of by-catch native and smaller run fish.
Maybe only allowing them to dip net would be a healthy change. Plus it’s more work, getting back the current generation of native to their roots instead of drugs/alcohol that’s 4x as prevalent in adolescents on tribes.