Not surprising, and that mentality is not limited to WA. The AK troll fleet got shut down right before the second king opener as an emergency conservation measure for the Taku and Chilkat rivers. We left 31000+ treaty kings in the water to completely eliminate any chance of impacting the non-treaty kings from those rivers.
The net result of that draconian conservation measure? An estimated 160 additional kings hit the gravel in those two rivers. That's a helluva sacrifice to make for 160 fish.
The Canadians, upon hearing how many treaty kings AK was sacrificing to ensure escapement, quickly followed suit and also put their fleet on the beach...
I crack myself up. No, of course the Canadians didn't do that... They said "Thank you, dummies" and shifted a bunch of effort from inside waters to outside waters to intercept this bonanza of fish we didn't take on their way south...
Why do I tell this story?
It will happen to the sport guys in Puget Sound, too. Those Stilliguamish kings don't know boundaries, and I have no reason to believe they don't roam the entire Salish Sea at some point during their lives. I believe Canadian fisheries biology is years behind our own, and they seem to just react to whatever their neighbors are doing. So I anticipate the king fishing is going to be pretty darn good just north of the US / Canadian border for the next ten years... Courtesy of the Washington sport anglers.
