Chum Choke Sound

Fish management

Chum will be returning by the hundreds of thousands to hatcheries on Hood Canal and elsewhere this month. And, once again, commercial netters will be killing the fish, stripping their eggs and dumping their carcasses in the Sound or leaving them to rot on the beach.

Such wastage is against state and tribal laws. But both the state and the tribes are a part of the problem.

They have known for years that chum salmon return to the Sound in numbers far exceeding what meat markets can absorb. Yet they keep producing the fish and wasting them.

This fall, biologists are expecting a return of nearly 400,000 chum to the Hoodsport Hatchery on Hood Canal, in the usual and accustomed fishing area of the Skokomish tribe, where some of the most egregious wastage has occurred.

Millions of pounds of protein are about to go to waste again, and the state and the tribes have found no way to provide fish for the hungry. They have found no companies to process chum into pet food or organizations to convert salmon into fish-food fertilizer.

Hood Canal once was rich in hatchery coho and chinook. But years ago, under a different administration, the old Department of Fisheries struck a deal with the tribe, turn it into a factory for chum-salmon, which are cheaper to raise.