OK
My last post on this thread was on the 19th. The WDFW got back to me the next day with a message. They said that they talked it over and agreed that the rules are about as I reported them on my last post.
Canoe Rider, I do not have any idea of how the WDFW operates. That is in contrast to the difficult and constructive experiences so many of our members have in working with that department over the years. I can just imagine a few years ago hearings being held between the WDFW, interested parties, and the folks from Des Moines. Concerns about rights, and restrictions, and fish, and wildlife, and the protection of a creek and a park that was going to cost someone a lot of money, all of these things were discussed. Language was developed by someone, or a body of someones, that would get the job done, rules were written. Time went by, in my imagination, people retired, expired, got drunk, or got married, or took up dancing, and no one remembered the meetings and what was said back then. Then later this guy says, "Hey it may not be legal to fish there". So the City Parks Department and the people at the Marina are assuming that it is illegal to fish there too, every body knows that ( I do not feel like reiterating the language of the regs). My point is that; I was going to say law but it is better to say rules, can be ambiguous. The couple of helpful and friendly folks in the City I talked to assumed that you cannot fish there. The couple of helpful and friendly folks at WDFW did a little research and thought that under certain circumstances you could.
My personal sense of the rules is that you could not kill resident Coho or anything else in that area, and that you could c/r trout, but that doing so would be out of the spirit if not the technicality of the law. Now, if I saw someone casting a fly down there I would not drop any dimes. I do not know what the rest of our citizenry would do, I often expect the worst. It is an everlasting struggle for me to not go there, wade out with my fly pole and my ass showing, and jump up and down yelling FUCK at the top of my lungs. I don't have to always do that now (why I don't know) but as a sympathetic poet attributed to Dylan on another thread today "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." And as Elliot said, roughly "Men dream of systems so perfect that no one has to be good."
sb