Local commercial and sport fishers caught something really unusual last week — a break — likely to allow a full summer of fishing locally.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council last Friday adopted possible management options that will allow a longer season for recreational and commercial king salmon fishers in California and Oregon.
While a complicated process involving state and federal agencies must still be completed, the recommendations of the federal panel mean a reversal of last year”s drastic cuts in commercial and sport fishing.
“What this means is that local recreational fishermen will have a full season, which began in February and will run through Nov. 11, with no closures in the best fishing months of the summertime,” said Jim Martin, West Coast regional director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance.
“Commercial fishermen along the coast will have a much better season this year but limited fishing opportunities off Fort Bragg due to continuing concerns about Klamath fall chinook runs,” Martin said.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council makes its recommendations to the National Marine Fisheries Service. That organization will issue a final decision about the various West Coast salmon fisheries in Seattle in April after public hearings in the three states.
The vote for more fishing was a drastic turnaround. Last year, the federal government imposed the most restrictive salmon season on record for Oregon and California, based on declining stocks in the Klamath River basin.
Commercial fishing was limited by as much as 90 percent along 700 miles of coastline from Northern California up most of the Oregon coast, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The total west coast commercial catch for 2006 was 12 percent of a typical year, representing direct losses to fishers of $16 million. That led to a federal declaration of a failed season, but federal aid has never materialized beyond small business loans for fishers and related businesses, the Chronicle reported.
The closure was forced by three years of poor returns to the Klamath River. Commercial and sport fishers bashed regulators and regulations alike and complained they were hit unfairly by the restrictions, arguing that they were paying the price for dams, habitat destroyed by logging and mining, and poor water management.
Now the fishers are on the other edge of the Endangered Species Act sword. The act forces imposition of restrictions when one population goes into crisis.
Thanks in part to fishing cutbacks, as many as 65,000 chinook returned to the Klamath River during the fall run, nearly double the minimum required by state and federal fisheries regulators who monitor the declining population, the Sacramento Bee reported.
The commercial fishing cuts helped; about 30,400 natural spawners returned to the Klamath River last fall, well above the 21,000 predicted initially — which is what triggered the drastic season cuts. This year, 65,300 spawners are predicted.
But the news is bad for the salmon on the Sacramento River — which is where most Mendocino Coast salmon come from.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council said the 2006 Sacramento River area salmon count was about half the previous season run, the lowest numbers since 1992. In the Sacramento River there were an estimated 435,000 chinook, the Bee reported.
“Sacramento chinook returns were lower than expected, but we have to remember that these are estimates and projections for 2007, and it”s not an exact science,” said Martin.
Because the drop in Sacramento River numbers doesn”t represent a threat to that still healthy run, no fishing cuts are expected to result. Even with the big run on the Klamath, the number of total salmon in the region could be down but that doesn”t matter under the Endangered Species Act. Reformers have called for changing the act to make it more reasonable and to spread out fixes over an entire ecosystem instead. Environmentalists fear making any changes in an era when one major political party”s platform has become to favor business over environmental concerns in ways that the Reagan and Clinton administrations would never have supported.
A clue to the Sacramento River salmon decline emerged in a study published last week by the National Academy of Sciences, linking fewer salmon to global warming. It documents a broad decline in Pacific Ocean food sources. The cause was a southern shift in the jet stream in spring 2005, the report stated.
That current of winds normally drives a deep upwelling in the ocean off Oregon and Washington that feeds the food chain. But the jet stream blew over California instead, disrupting ocean currents and causing a population decline among mussels and barnacles that feed on plankton, the Bee reported.
Klamath River salmon may have been less affected by these changes because they don”t range as far in the ocean as Central Valley fish, according to published reports.
Retention of coho (silver) salmon is prohibited this year as usual. Both kinds of salmon are hooked off the Mendocino Coast but smaller cohos must be released without taking them into the boat.
