La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

Thanks for the free paper, Mr. Editor, even if I’d read it before. I think I’ve missed maybe one, since your arrival as publisher all those years ago. I like to think of myself as a La Connerite, but perhaps I’m not. The Beaver Marsh and Fir Island are formally Mount Vernon, but here is where I hang out. I fished the channel when there were some fish here and I fished the Skagit River when fish were there. Now I fish neither, nope, not enough fish anywhere! Now I grit my teeth and look a bit pitiful, with my steely glare and my mostly missing white hair.

I’m not sure what to think about DNR’s decision to end all finfish rearing in their waters, does this include trout ponds and hatcheries? Now that we’ve lessened the fish counts, are we going to throw in the towel, give up and hope that they’ll return to pre-industrial levels? We just saw the devastating effect of rubber tires breaking down, causing coho deaths in an expensively rehabilitated stream. As a student of soils, fish, flora and fauna, I’ve designed and strategized several systems to help these dwindling stocks. Remediating contaminated waters is in my wheelhouse, along with my colleagues, yeah, a few of us have been at it for fifty years! Some of us have become famous, while some of us have studied in obscurity, struggling to get our dissertations heard.

Milo Moore became famous here for his work with salmon and fish food, yet next to nowhere is his work revealed. As a ten year old boy he caught a 62 pound Chinook, at Mount Vernon, on the Skagit. He headed the state’s department of fisheries during much of the ‘40’s, spent his whole life establishing coho and chum runs, in Japan, Korea and even Wisconsin! Then he created the fish food to feed them, yeah, somehow his fame has gone the way of the salmon, from struggling to threatened, then endangered, extremely rare.

So, who now has a great new strategy? I keep my ear to the ground, but I hear nary a sound, even when the fish are seldom found and we all hope for a miracle recovery for the watershed of the Salish Sea, we see not the dire situation, or think it’s important to listen to different ideas.

Glen S Johnson

Skagit Valley