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This past week while fishing the Carbon I talked to an 80 year old lifetime resident of Orting while he was walking his dog along the levee. He used to fish all the time, but has lost all of his fishing partners. He told me about the hay days of the Carbon, Little Puyallup, Voights Creek, and the South Prairie Creek.
He remembers seeing Voights Creek so stuffed with Chinook they would literally go on shore to get around the other masses of fish. The hops farmers near the creek would pitchfork the plentiful salmon and place a carcass near each plant. These rivers and creeks were fished hard and they always produced, year after year.
Fifty to one hundred years ago they would log right up to the creeks and rivers, septic tanks were crude and inefficient if at all, there were many more dairy farms with runoff near the creeks, and Commencement Bay was spewing every hazardous substance into the water. Heck they even used to have garbage barges dumping into the sound. Our environment is a lot cleaner now and most of the environmental problems have been curtailed.
So with all that, how could there have been such healthy salmon and steelhead stocks up until 30 years ago? Was it a century of waste and abuse, gill nets, sportsmen over fishing, hatcheries, or over management? I know some will say all of above, but the fish returned in abundance for near a century with all of this going on, what happened in the 1980's to start such a drastic decline?
He remembers seeing Voights Creek so stuffed with Chinook they would literally go on shore to get around the other masses of fish. The hops farmers near the creek would pitchfork the plentiful salmon and place a carcass near each plant. These rivers and creeks were fished hard and they always produced, year after year.
Fifty to one hundred years ago they would log right up to the creeks and rivers, septic tanks were crude and inefficient if at all, there were many more dairy farms with runoff near the creeks, and Commencement Bay was spewing every hazardous substance into the water. Heck they even used to have garbage barges dumping into the sound. Our environment is a lot cleaner now and most of the environmental problems have been curtailed.
So with all that, how could there have been such healthy salmon and steelhead stocks up until 30 years ago? Was it a century of waste and abuse, gill nets, sportsmen over fishing, hatcheries, or over management? I know some will say all of above, but the fish returned in abundance for near a century with all of this going on, what happened in the 1980's to start such a drastic decline?