If you have a fish on… other fishermen will reel in to not cause you to lose your fish in a tangle up. This is normal fisherman courtesies. As for commercial fisher men like Sean said… it’s not fair to have gillnets out.

I should know how efficient commercial gillnets are being a former Alaskan Bearing Sea / Bristol Bay gillnet fisherman in my early 20’s for a couple of seasons. We were very very efficient catching salmon.

I now have a different opinion of gillnets because of all the endangered salmon in pretty much every river in Washington State. We have many and most rivers have more than one endangered salmon species. There is 5 different salmon species in Pacific salmon. Gillnets should be illegal because they kill indiscriminately any and all fish endangered or not and or birds or anything that gets tangled up in the nets. There is better methods of fishing that you can catch and release the endangered fish or incidental catch. Some day this gillnet method will be illegal. The sooner the better to help the salmon and all others that need the salmon. Like the Orca’s and other marine animals. We have tried every type of a
restoration to bring back the salmon except banning gillnets. We will never recover any salmon runs until the gillnet is deemed illegal says a former gillnet fisherman… that’s me!