Most of the seiners that call Washington’s Puget Sound home head to Alaska for spring herring and summer salmon. But what do you do when you can’t line up new permits and your boat has a long list of repairs? Well for the owners of the 56-foot seiner Memories out of Gig Harbor, the answer was simple: fish at home.

Freelancer Lael Henterly goes aboard the seiner for a day of fishing in South Sound for fall chums in an At-Sea feature on page 22 of our March issue. It may not be Alaska, but a dark-to-dark day with 4,700 pounds of salmon is still a good day fishing.

Kendall Henry, a Puget Sound Commercial Salmon Fishery Manager with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, sent in some further notes on the local observer program:

“The reason the observers are out there is that chinook and coho have been designated by the WDFW commission as priority species for recreational fishermen in Puget Sound. Recreational priority combined with concerns over ESA listed stocks has meant that we have to require the commercial seine fleet to release chinook and coho in many of their fisheries and since these species are no longer appearing on fish tickets, we need observers to know how many fish they are encountering. In Puget Sound we are not out there with some sort of enforcement agenda to estimate compliance with the rules. Our observers are out there to count fish, and that is it.”

One note of correction is that the observer’s name in the story was Brandon Phinney, not Phinnell.