Understanding Washington Fishing Regulations

I have spent years studying the fishing laws in an attempt to translate them into English.

The fisheries resource is divided between competing groups of tribal, commercial and sport fishermen who can only agree on one thing: banning the other guy’s gear. This is done with a cabal of bought-and-paid-for biologists and the plundering rhetoric of greed bloated lobbyists who stack the deck for a self-serving staff of anonymous career opportunists, who don’t fish themselves.

The latest evidence suggests the fishing laws are a sort of primitive code formulated with a roulette wheel. Every spin of the roulette wheel passes a new fishing law or shuts down the season with something called, “the emergency closure.” And you never know when that can happen. If fishing is bad, they’ll shut down the fishing because we aren’t catching any. If fishing is good, they’ll shut it down because we might catch too many. All of which begs the question, how can anyone figure out the latest fishing laws? Ask a fishing guide. That’s why we get paid the big money.

One of the most important rules in steelhead fishing is the clipped-fin regulation that requires you to release any fish that has an intact adipose fin. The missing adipose fin indicates the fish came from a hatchery where the fin was clipped. Unfortunately, not all hatchery fish have a clipped adipose fin so they are considered a wild fish you cannot keep. Then again, different hatcheries clip different fins just to mess with us.

Here are some examples.

Clipped Dorsal Fin

Clipped Ventral Fin

Clipped adipose fin

Clipped dorsal, ventral and adipose fin.