Salmon season may shut down again this year
Peter Fimrite
San Francisco Chronicle
03/10/2009
You know the fish aren't jumpin' when the very people who make their living reeling in chinook salmon are proposing a ban on ocean fishing for a second straight year.
That is exactly what happened Monday at the annual Pacific Fishery Management Council meetings in Seattle, where the gory details of the catastrophic decline of California's salmon has become woefully apparent.
Fishing-industry representatives on a council advisory panel looked at the dismal state of the fall run of Sacramento River salmon and proposed closing the 2009 ocean salmon fishing season, except, perhaps, for a bit of recreational fishing near the Oregon border.
"It is pretty simple in California," said Peter Dygert, a fishery biologist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's fisheries service. "Both the recreational and commercial trollers on the advisory panel have proposed no fishing."
The management council, a 14-member federal panel that manages the Pacific Coast fishery, is expected to come up with three options for ocean fishing after a week of testimony and the digestion of mounds of documents and studies.
There isn't much mystery about what the council will propose, given that the folks most likely to lobby for more fishing are proposing the elimination of the season. The only thing to decide, really, is whether to allow recreational fishing on certain dates in the summer from the Oregon border south to a spot near the mouth of the Klamath River, which had a slightly better salmon return than the Central Valley river system.
The current proposals would allow sportfishing over the July 4 weekend and from Aug. 15 to Sept. 7. An alternate plan would allow it only from Aug. 29 to Sept. 7.
Biologists estimated only 66,000 adult salmon returned to spawn last fall in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, based on a count of egg nests in the river bed. It was the lowest return on record. The collapse caused regulators to ban ocean salmon fishing in California and most of Oregon last year.
The collapse led to an emergency declaration and appropriation of federal disaster assistance to keep fishing businesses alive.
The dismal spawning numbers are expected to continue this year. Fisheries biologists are projecting that the fall run of chinook in the system this year will be a little bit higher than last year. Still, the numbers will barely reach the council's spawning goals even if there is no fishing, according to the projections.
Both the Klamath and Sacramento rivers have suffered recently from extremely low returns. Declines have also been seen in the Columbia-Snake River System over the past several years.
Last year, more than 2,200 fishermen and fishing-related business workers lost their jobs. Fishing communities and fishing-related businesses lost more than $250 million, according to some estimates. Indirect economic impacts were even higher, according to fishing industry representatives.
The collapse in California is especially troubling because the Central Valley fall run of chinook has for many years been the backbone of the West Coast fishing industry. Big salmon from the Sacramento River have been reeled in as far north as Alaska, according to biologists...
