Boldt decision 35 years later, and the wild west salmon wars of Belfair

These days when I hear someone complain about the Boldt Decision I tell them to “Get over it. The decision got upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1979 and it’s not going back.”It probably took me 20 years to get over it, mainly because of the commercial salmon massacre I witnessed between 1975 and 1980.

I’ve been marine mechanic for over 47 years and during the 1970s I worked on a lot of tribal beach seine boats that were responsible for nearly wiping out many salmon runs in HoodCanal. These boats were usually 17 to 20-feet long with a 150-foot net attached to the bow with an anchor on the other end. Groups of salmon from 20 to 200 would hang out in five to 20 feet of water near the mouth of a river for a few days before going up to spawn.

An experienced fisherman would slowly get the fish bunched up heading up the beach then gas it to get in front of them. The guy on the bow would then throw the anchor on the beach and the driver would quickly put the boat in reverse as the net came off the bow, once the boat was near the beach the fish were trapped.

This was an extremely effective way to catch salmon that were waiting to go up a small river like the DewattoRiver on HoodCanal. This method was perfected by commercial perch fishermen in the 1950s and 60s.

Joe Smith and Ron Gunderson were a couple of the best perch fishermen in their day, sometimes catching 2500 pounds of perch in one set. Perch fishermen were so good at it, the days of commercial perch fishing are long gone.

A handful of tribal fishermen learned this technique for salmon in the 1970s and quickly became experts. Now most Tribal fishermen use a gill net attached to the beach and the other end to an anchored buoy.

The February 1974 Boldt Decision changed the world of fishing in Western Washington in an instant. The ruling gave the tribes up to 50 percent of the harvestable salmon and steelhead and the right to manage their fishermen and fishing seasons. Later this was also applied to shellfish.

The State of Washington was stunned because it lost and the Tribes were stunned because they won. And what the heck did 50 percent of the harvestable salmon even mean? Fish managers didn’t have enough information on individual rivers to know what that number was. The tribes didn’t even have salmon biologists or managers back then.

From 1975 to 1980, fishing rules were not always followed and enforcement was difficult and dangerous. Most all rivers in Puget Sound and Hood Canal were plugged with tribal gill nets and throughout the inland waters commercial salmon fishermen tried to catch as many as they could.

It seemed like the race was on to catch the last salmon.

By 1980, the Federal Government told the state and the tribes to get along and co-manage the resource properly or else. By that time it was too late, nearly 90 percent of the salmon runs were gone.

True wild Chinook and Steelhead will probably never recover. Wild Coho faired a little better. Pinks and chum bounce back pretty fast when ocean conditions are good and in the last 15 years have done well.

There were at least two other problems for salmon from 1976 until the late 1980s. Ocean conditions were so terrible many of the usual food sources for salmon weren’t available. The other problem, which is still a problem, was the degrading watershed habitat from logging and development and just too many people in general.

From 1975 to 1979 would have to be classified as the Wild West Salmon Harvest Period. Nearly every day during September and October a float plane would land in the middle of HoodCanal in front of Hoodsport with $100,000 in $100 dollar bills to buy salmon.

Some friends of mine had jobs buying salmon from tribal fishermen. There were occasionally guns, drugs and booze involved in these transactions, sometimes making things a little uneasy.

In 1976, two friends of mine pulled a gill net from under the TahuyaRiverBridge. They were on the bridge looking at the river when the owners of the net approached them with a couple baseball bats. Not having many options they jumped in the river and swam as fast as they could. By the time they got back to their truck the attackers and their van were gone. They were pretty mad by that time and headed down the road at nearly full speed. They caught up to them and emptied a 357 magnum into the back of the van.

Amazingly, no one got hurt.

Miles Philips and his buddy weren’t quite so lucky. In fall of 1977 they were in a 12-foot aluminum boat a couple miles north of Dewatto stealing salmon from a gill net. When the owner arrived in his 19-foot Glasply he was in a bad mood. With the bow up he circled the small-time thieves until their boat filled with water and sunk. He then continued until their hip boots filled up with water and they sunk. A few days later they floated up, but I guess the so-called mystery was never solved.

Most of these people involved in these true stories have since passed away.

The commercial fisherman that got shot off Foulweather Bluff in October 1976 when he tried to ram a fisheries patrol boat stops by my shop for boat parts once in a while. He still has mental and physical disabilities and doesn’t work, but he survived.

Those were difficult times for many people, and the most amazing thing is salmon fishing is really good these days.

Special thanks to all our dedicated salmon hatchery workers. Without their hard work we would all be playing more golf.