Dear Alaska Board of Fisheries,

It appears that we have very little information regarding where our Kenai River king salmon migrate to when leaving the river. This lack of information makes it is very difficult to understand what is killing them in the ocean. I requested that our ADF&G establish a juvenile king tagging program to study these migration routes but was informed that this kind of fish tagging technology does not exists.

Hatching up millions of sockeye salmon and dumping them into the ocean may seem like a good idea but has anyone really sat down and figured out what all those extra mouths are suppose to eat? Our ADF&G projected 6 -7 million sockeye returning to Cook Inlet this year with a commercial gill net harvest of 4.9 million. Has anyone even asked how many sockeye nature would normally have run in Upper Cook Inlet this year without the help of the ADF&G? A whole lot of these sockeye are returning because our ADF&G hatched those sockeye eggs out and dumped them into the ocean.

Some have asked why our ADF&G wishes to enforce a catch and release fishery on the Kenai River early run of king salmon. Some say it is because the fishery resource is troubled. The ADF&G claims that the 5 AAC 57.160 Kenai River Early-run King Plan, allows them to enforce this catch and release fishery. If you read 5 AAC 57.160, it doesn’t take long for a person to discover that it does not grant the ADF&G this kind of authority unless they can (pre-season) project a low or high escapement.

A teacher in Loveland’s Mary Blair Elementary School, Leavenworth, Colo., kicked a 7-year-old student out of school for pretending to throw a hand grenade. Sounds kind of crazy right? A sure sign of a society gone crazy is when it allows anyone to pretend to kill anything. With that said, why would we even need to pretend to kill something? Isn’t it bad enough that we have to kill sometimes to live on planet earth but why would anyone need to pretend to kill a person, a bird, a bug or anything?