The science of salmon restoration has done a complete turnaround since Fort Bragg commercial fishers started rearing Coho salmon in 1972 on the Georgia-Pacific Mill site pond and in Avery Pond in Mendocino. Back then, the commercial fishing industry was booming and hatchery science was in its infancy.
For 36 years, Fort Bragg”s Salmon Restoration Association has endured rain, floods, government red tape and even a drought of volunteers to successfully raise baby salmon and raise money with the World”s Largest Salmon Barbecue every Saturday before the Fourth of July. At the July 7 barbecue this year, the organization, which benefits from the donated labor of the entire Mendocino Coast business community and volunteers from numerous other non-profits is searching for yet another new course.
The history of the Salmon Restoration Association shows that to help salmon a group has to be as flexible and innovative as those fish that migrate from the ocean depths and leap through the air to clear dams and get home.
There have been many heroic efforts and many heroes of hard work over the decades but the agency”s direction has changed about as many times as the mighty Eel River itself.
The man who ran the hatchery for many years, Jerry Wall, has retired and is no longer involved at the hatchery.
The dream of all those early fishers — to replenish the ocean fishery — hasn”t happened.
After nearly 30 years of effort on Hollow Tree Creek, the Eel River hasn”t bounced back, despite dollars and fish raised in the millions.
A river that once carried millions of fish now carries thousands or possibly even hundreds in bad years. The scientific world has learned over the last decade that hatcheries don”t accomplish what everyone had once hoped they would — a return to the days when the Eel River sponsored a cannery industry as big as those on Alaskan rivers..
Dams, water diversions and the mudding effect of erosion have compromised virtually all the rivers with natural salmon populations.
On the Eel, California”s third longest river, diversions are primarily to benefit Potter Valley, while the erosion is caused mostly by historic clear-cut logging, scientists say. Logging companies, such as the Mendocino Redwoods Company, have extensive restoration operations that the Salmon Restoration Association could link with.
What”s wrong with hatcheries?
While science has a variety of ideas about that, there is consensus that a hatchery contributing to a river like the Eel, can”t make any real difference by itself. Some scientists feel that hatcheries are in general a bad idea, causing genetic uniformity, creating hatchery fish that compete with and limit the numbers of truly wild fish from a bigger genetic pool.
But the Hollow Tree Creek Hatchery takes only a sampling of fish and let”s others go by. Also, it is not the end of a river and wild fish do breed successfully both upstream and downstream. As evidence that wild fish thrive is the fact that there are many Coho salmon in the stream. Coho cannot be removed from the water and are never spawned at the hatchery, which deals only with Chinook salmon.
Dr. Robin Waples, a senior scientist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, said a hatchery must be paired with serious work on the river for the long-term health of salmon populations to truly benefit.
“Hatcheries have demonstrated potential to buy you time in the short term, keeping the population going while you fix the habitat problems that caused the decline in the first place,” Waples said.
The Northwest Fisheries Science Center, of the federal agency NOAA, now operates a Webpage at www.nwfsc.noaa.gov, that lists all the problems, from genetics to overfishing, that hatchery operations are said to contribute to.
Hatcheries have played a role in creating big population increases of salmon on rivers like the Sacramento — where diversions were also cut and habitat improved. But the science continues to evolve.
The problem all over the Pacific Northwest, scientists say, is that the habitat problems that created the need for hatcheries haven”t been fixed and have gotten worse in many places. In some areas larger hatcheries have been identified as damaging biological diversity and have been closed or curtailed.
Hollow Tree Creek Hatchery was among the first privately run hatcheries and now is one of the very last still in operation.
That”s what makes it so attractive to scientists, environmentalists and fishing advocates alike.
The definitive history of the World”s Largest Salmon Barbecue was written by biologist and fisherman Michael Maahs, who died in 2000 at age 44 while crab fishing with his father William “Sonny” Maahs. Both father and son had played key roles in the Salmon Restoration Association over the years.
While association”s efforts did produce some exciting results for fishermen, the revival of the resource never happened as expected, the report states.
“The continuation of the Hollow tree Hatchery could play a key role in maintaining the Eel River salmon run, but the poor showing at the hatchery at this millennium change does not bode well for the future of this precious salmon resource,” the 1999 history by the late fisherman Maahs concludes.
“SRA”s salmon propagation efforts will come under increased scrutiny as the issue of artificial propagation divides public opinion,” the report predicts.
The report describes how a serious effort to restore salmon led to a fund-raising barbecue, an event that now eclipses the original purpose.
“Four men, Bill Grader, a fish processor and local political fund-raiser; Augie Avila, a county supervisor; Bill Maahs and Frank Haun, two local commercial fishermen; came up with the idea after having met with California Department of Fish and Game representatives,” the history reports.
The local salmon fleet numbered around 300 vessels in the early 1980s, Mike Maahs reported in 1999. There were just 20 boats at work at the turn of the century and even fewer now.
The history reveals the long hours commercial fishermen spent to raise salmon, ranging from the fish in Avery Pond, fed by Mendocino High School students in 1972, to the state of the art hatchery now in operation on Hollow Tree Creek. The Avery Pond Coho salmon didn”t want to leave and instead begged for more food when an attempt was made to release them to the ocean. Not surprisingly, the G-P mill site pond was too warm for salmon.
Efforts got much more sophisticated as time went on, with inmates from Chamberlain Creek Conservation Camp helping raise fish on Big River, and all local rivers and creeks being studied and worked on.
In the late 1970s there was a switch from Coho salmon towards Chinook salmon, bigger and more popular with fishermen.
“In addition, after seven years of Coho ponding projects, the organization didn”t have much to show. There were a couple years where large numbers of Coho were seen returning to the Ten Mile River, but a return of the wild Coho run was not happening,” the history written by the late Maahs says.
In 1979, a local coalition including timber companies, Fish and Game and commercial fishers went looking for a new site. Six Eel River tributaries in Mendocino County as well as two in Humboldt County were considered. Hollow tree Creek was the site of choice out of the six Mendocino County sites identified.
“Timber companies were anxious to do something to help recover salmon stocks befor eblame could be placed squarely at their door for the depressed conditions of the runs through habitat destruction,” the history states.
In his son”s report, Sonny Maahs recalls recommending Hollow tree Creek as a potential site. “In the late 1940s I worked in the Hollow tree Mill and spent an afternoon walking around the area where I dropped down into a canyon and saw a bunch of very large Chinook salmon spawning. The large number of salmon in Hollow tree Creek and its proximity to Fort Bragg is what led me to recommend Hollow Tree Creek,” the history states.
During the 1980s and 1990s, SRA reared salmon and even steelhead on both Ten Mile River and Hollow Tree Creek and helped rear fish for local tributaries such as Pudding Creek and those as far away as the Trinity and Russian Rivers. Chinook Salmon fingerlings escaped into the 10 Mile River, creating a stock there.
In the early years, the Salmon Restoration Association got several “thank you” donations of salmon from the state of Wisconsin. This stock of fish originated in Northern California. and had been planted into Lake Michigan, helping create a multi-million dollar fishery there. They were shipped to California as a pay-back for that successful effort to introduce salmon into the Great Lakes, the history reports. However, they arrived in square tubs used for transporting tomatoes to harvest, causing health problems related to cleaning until the Salmon Restoration Association installed circular tanks.
In fall 1984, a new facility was constructed approximately a half-mile upstream on Hollow Tree Creek, the site of the current hatchery. This consisted of a permanent weir with a concrete foundation. In addition, a hatchery and water system was constructed so that eggs would no longer have to be shipped to distant California Department of Fish and Game facilities for hatching and early rearing. This hatchery has been in operation since 1984 and has undergone many improvements and expansions to become a state-of-the-art fish rearing facility which recently passed its DFG inspection.
Maahs” history documents the transition in the 1980s from an event run and manned by commercial fishers to one run by community business leaders, who were involved from the beginning by the founders. He shows how this change mirrored the decline of the timber and fishing industries, with the rise of the tourism industry.
Maahs” rich history of the SRA can be found at www.salmonrestoration.org.
While many of the original SRA organizers have died, retired commercial fisherman Sonny Maahs related last year vivid stories, such as the year 1988 when Fort Bragg commercial fishermen landed 4 million pounds of salmon. When he started out in 1950, there was no such thing as sport fishing boats or a recreational fishing industry. Maahs points to the incongruity of the efforts to increase corporate fish farming, while little is being done for wild salmon.
Like the scientists, Maahs says the river habitat must be improved and the food supply thus increased on the Eel for the hatchery effort to really help the Eel river.
“The food in all these rivers is a real limiting factor,” Maahs said, stating the Salmon Restoration Association learned a great deal about biology over the decades of hard, mostly volunteer, work.
Gery Grader, whose husband founded the SRA and whose son Zeke has grown to international fame as the head of the Pacific Coast Federation of Commercial Fishermen, building bridges between environmental, economic and old fashioned fishermen, says what has happened to the local fleet is “very, very sad.”
