"Loving the Puget Sound to Death"

"Four decades after the passage of the Clean Water Act, regulators haven’t kept up with the pollution pressure that growing populations put on America’s shorelines."

"Hidden amid the pleasure boats and cargo ships that roar through the canal in northwest Seattle is one of the oldest fishing economies in North America. From midsummer to October, from early morning until after dusk, fishermen from the Suquamish Tribe zoom up and down the canal in orange waterproof overalls, tending to salmon nets that dangle across the water like strings of pearls. The tribe holds reservation land about ten miles west of the city, on the far side of Puget Sound, the 100-mile-long estuary that extends from Olympia, Washington, north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Suquamish are one of more than a dozen tribes that have fishing and shellfish-harvesting rights all across this region, and their fishing traditions, which are thousands of years old, predate all of the oldest shipyard industries here.

The men unload salmon at “A Dock,” a section of a boatyard reserved for tribal fishing boats. This is where I find longtime fisherman Willy Pratt on a late September morning, at the back of a parking lot on a wooden platform that overlooks the gleaming luxury yachts of the adjacent marina. Pratt has fished in Puget Sound his whole life, and he is here for the peak of coho salmon migration, which pulses through the inner part of the estuary this month. Pratt has marked the nickname Coho Willy in hot pink tape on the side of the giant blue cooler he plans to fill with the fish that his nephews net that day. He holds up a photo of himself as a 6-year-old boy leaning against a boat on the beach. “This is me in 1949,” he says. “This is my grandfather’s skiff.”"

Madeline Ostrander reports for the Nation February 4, 2015.