The shoreline management act is undergoing changes and we have created a user's guide to help you access public shorelines for fishing and clamming.

We at Backcountry Hunters & Anglers are all about access, and behind the scenes, with partners in Washington State, we have been working on a project to clarify coastal access for hunters & anglers by creating a consolidated landing page for the hunting and angling public to find the tools needed to clarify where they can find places to fish, hunt, and just enjoy Washington’s coastline. In Washington, shoreline access in the coastal waters of Puget Sound, Hood Canal, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca has been an ongoing issue for decades.

 Though the outer coast of Washington is managed similarly to Oregon, California, and many other coastal states, granting access to the mean high-water mark, these interior coastal waters consist of a patchwork of ownership where more than sixty percent of these tidelands are privately owned, creating a legally murky framework where it is unclear where the public trust right to access the waters intersects with private property rights. Since so much of our tidelands exist in this legal gray area, more private property signs have been put up in areas where access and the right to fish or clam are contested, and the public has often been asked to back away and defer to private landowner rights even where there is a legitimate right to access and recreate. Since enforcement has tended to defer to private property owners in these circumstances, we have seen access eroded one spot at a time for years.

Currently, the Department of Ecology is holding public meetings and soliciting public comments to review aspects of the Shoreline Management Act (SMA). Items up for discussion include public access priorities, enforcement authority, critical area protections, and coastal stabilization, among others.

We’d like to see SMA rulemaking and planning do a better job of clearly identifying the public tidelands by improving the accuracy of county GIS tideland parcel boundary mapping, erecting clear, verifiable signage, and providing open access information instead of defaulting to the most restrictive interpretation of land ownership whenever things get complicated, a property owner objects, or law enforcement gets involved. We also want a clear definition of access that includes access to the beach for fishing, clamming, and moving along the shoreline where public trust rights support these uses. A bench or short trail that provides a view of the water is not a point of shoreline access. We want to see the SMA utilized to help the Department of Ecology, local governments, and enforcement authorities inventory historical access sites, identify new access sites, and identify places where public access rights are unclear, giving the most generous interpretation to the public when it is a matter of their discretion, and to restore areas where public access has been lost due to wrongfully posted signs or other means of deterring public use.

The Department of Ecology recently updated the shoreline atlas to include over 900 access sites, and we have created a landing page on our website to help you use this tool. We have a video walkthrough and PDF guide for those of you who are new to using GIS tools, and we have a printable PDF handout of what activities are protected in public trust waters and tideland, and what could land you in a legal gray area if access is disputed. 

Visit the Washington BHA Shoreline Access Resource page HERE.

Access on paper isn’t enough; if you can, submit your comments and attend a public meeting for the SMA rule-making process. Tell the Department of Ecology what constitutes quality shoreline access, what that access means to you as an angler, and politely describe any difficulties or frustrations you have had gaining that access in the past.The last day to comment is November 17th. 

You can view upcoming meetings and submit a comment online HERE.

We at the Washington Chapter will keep you updated as the process moves forward for SMA rulemaking and any other Shoreline Access issues that arise. The Coastal Atlas User's guide, landing page, and handout are all steps in our effort to help anglers, but we have more to come. Check back periodically for more updates or sign up for our newsletter if you haven't already.