A Fine Night For Hoisting At The Highliner Tavern

OUTSIDE the Highliner Tavern at Fishermen's Terminal, the wind-whipped waters of Salmon Bay were nasty enough to drive the hardiest gill-netter for cover. Inside, election night brought safe harbor.

Voters were drowning Initiative 640, a net-restriction assault on commercial fishing.

Glasses of beer and blue-and-orange "NO ON 640" signs were hoisted high when results showed 57 percent of the voters rejecting the initiative.

It was a fitting anti-640 election-watch site - one of the favorite watering holes of the commercial fleet. The tavern's name denotes a fisherman or fisherwoman with top catches. They are called highliners.

Before the election, I asked Rob Zuanich, executive director of the Purse Seine Vessel Owners Association, how he thought the campaign was going.

He said: "I don't know. All we can do is try to hold them under water until we don't see any bubbles."

After the last bubble disappeared Tuesday night, I asked him what turned the tide against the initiative with the motherhood slogan, "Save Our Sealife."

Zuanich had a one-word answer: "jobs." He said thousands of jobs would have been lost without one salmon saved.

This was an allocation fight brought on by recreational fishing interests who wanted a larger share of chinook and coho salmon at the expense of commercial fishing.

Frank Haw, co-chairman of I-640, is a good man. He's an avid sportsfisherman and former fisheries official who sincerely believes gillnetting and other commercial practices are wasteful. He believes more jobs would be created by giving a higher priority to recreational fishing.

There is merit in some of his arguments. But he helped write an initiative that a team of Philadelphia lawyers would be hard-pressed to figure out.

It included a complicated formula that would ban gear that killed more than 15 percent of "nontargeted" species. That means, for instance, coho taken unintentionally while fishing for pink salmon.

For the average voter, that was a head scratcher. I've been following these user-group fights for four decades and the initiative was fuzzy for me. When voters are in doubt about what an initiative will do, they tend to vote no. Many did. Rightly so.

I-640 wasn't a conservation issue. It was a who-gets-how-many-salmon issue. It was opposed by major conservation organizations.

Don Stuart, campaign manager of No On 640, said the conservation-community stance was a major factor in defeat of the initiative. "It gave us credibility," Stuart said.

I-640 had heavy support from industries on the Columbia River fighting salmon-restoration costs. Not a conservation plus.

Initiative sponsors showed deceiving commercials of sealife-killing, high-seas nets that are banned and never were used in Washington waters.

I-640 had more than enough reason for rejection.

I've been a lifelong sportsfisherman who gillnetted in Alaska many years ago while working my way through college. This measure never should have been on the ballot.

In Puget Sound in 1993, sports anglers caught 80,200 chinook and 136,000 coho. Non-Indian commercial fisherman took 18,100 chinook and 27,700 coho. The tribal catch would have been unaffected by the initiative.

John Van Amerogen, a Vashon Island resident who is editor of the Alaska Fisherman's Journal, said "this whole thing was over about 45,000 fish."

He said I-640 proponents unfairly vilified commercial fishing. "I'm a sportsfisherman too, but I like a fair fight."

Washington is an environmentally conscious state. It would have passed I-640 if that were the solution to dwindling salmon runs.

The environmental community knows larger questions such as habitat protection and improvement are the solutions - not another fish-share fight.

There is a lesson to be learned from I-640. It is that all users need to quit fighting over their share and start working together to rebuild our once-glorious salmon runs.

Don Hannula's column appears Thursday on editorial pages of The Times.