California Salmon Season Now a Bust for 2010

Barbender

Active Member
Declining salmon numbers doom season for third straight year
By Mike Taugher
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 02/11/2010 07:22:02 PM PST
Updated: 02/12/2010 06:47:33 AM PST


Don't count on buying a lot of California salmon again this year.

The run that until recently accounted for more than 80 percent of the salmon caught off the California coast has dipped to a record low.

"It's worse than we thought. There's no way in hell we have a season this year," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, a commercial salmon fishing group.

Late Thursday, the federal body that regulates salmon fishing off the West Coast posted figures on salmon returns this year.

Sacramento River fall-run, which had been the backbone of a salmon fishing industry that in the 1970s generated $100 million and supported a fishing fleet of 4,500 boats, now appears certain to be off-limits to fishing for a third straight year.

Before 2008, the fishery had never been closed.

The problem is that only 39,530 adult salmon returned this year to spawn, a significant decline from last year's low of more than 64,000.

What's worse is that experts were predicting a rebound in 2010 — not another drop.

"We'd hoped to untie the boats and go fishing, but with these numbers obviously that's not going to happen," Grader said.

When the salmon numbers collapsed in 2007, many fingers were pointed at fluctuating ocean conditions that reduced food supplies off the West Coast. After all, salmon numbers in other river systems — the Klamath River and the Columbia


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River — had also dropped.

But that no longer appears to tell the whole story. Klamath salmon numbers were high enough to possibly allow fishing this year.

Grader and other fishermen point at Delta water pumping as the primary cause of the decline.

"It's really not surprising what happened," said Dick Pool, a fishing tackle manufacturer in Concord, pointing to high Delta water pumping rates in recent years.

One of California's leading experts on native fish said the Delta pumps create major problems for migrating salmon, but there are other problems, too. The fall-run is now dominated by fish produced in hatcheries that were built to maintain fish after dams were erected and blocked most of the salmon spawning grounds.

Those hatchery fish can't withstand stresses the way a wild, and more genetically diverse, population can.

There could be other problems too, said UC Davis fisheries biologist Peter Moyle.

"It's pretty depressing," Moyle said. "I don't think anybody knows what's going on. They were predicting an increase."

Have fall-run salmon, once abundant enough to support a thriving commercial and recreational fishing, declined enough to be considered as a possibly endangered species?

"Oh yeah, for sure," Moyle said. "Given these trends, that should be seriously considered."
 
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