Originally Posted by
54bore
This is gonna sound like a total I hate Washington post, which I pretty much do. I was born and raised in a little town over on the coast, I spent 38 years over there, I cut my teeth fishing the rivers for salmon and steelhead, I owned a 16 ft willie wide bottom guide model drift boat and spent lots of time on the rivers, the game dept started taking away MORE AND MORE all the time, it went from catch and release steelhead to a total STOP, you couldn't even fish for dolly varden anymore (sold my boat since you couldn't fish anymore) I deer hunted all of my life, I took the hunter safety course when I was 8 yrs old, I killed a bear that year, and a deer, up to my early to mid 20s the deer hunting, and fishing were A class, it started dwindling down by my early 30s and got nothing but worse and worse, I personally know about every hound Hunter over there and they were trying to warn fish and game years ago (starting with my dad 20 plus yrs ago) that Cougars were getting badly out of hand and killing deer by ridiculous numbers!!! My dad even agreed to take them hunting and prove that he could easily tree 3 or 4 Cougars in a single day on one small mountain range alone, and that's just the cats that had crossed the rd in the snow, and there were MANY MANY mountain ranges over there! My dad wrote the game dept. explaining how bad it was and that it was just a matter of SHORT time until they totally wiped the deer out, studies have shown that A COUGAR WILL KILL 1 ADULT DEER A WEEK!! The game dept wrote back saying they were glad to hear that the cougar numbers were up and doing good! COMPLETE BUNCH OF IDIOTS!!! There were other obvious factors as well that hurt the deer, poaching, indians allowed to take anytime they wanted, they ran a late season buck hunt for years and years that really hurt the blacktail deer, the bucks were in full rut and dumb! pretty much a free for all, and lots of big bucks killed every year (just plain piss poor management)Now move ahead to now, try and a find a deer over there now! I know about everyone in that little town I grew up in and most of the guys hunt or at least would like to, the success rate on deer is HORRIBLE at best, most of the guys I know head over the mountains to eastern wa to deer hunt. The wa coast was a great place to grow up in the 70s-80s, and even most of the 90s, but in my opinion is a pathetic place anymore! I moved to Idaho 5 years ago, I couldn't even imagine going back to that place, my wife stil goes over to visit family and friends I stay behind, I totally despise the place! It's not the state of WA, the state is a beautiful state! But patheticly run. There's my rant for the day! I Couldn't resist when I read the 'encounters with salmon' I could rattle on and on about things I seen first hand there, but I'm done now.