Ban on West Coast salmon fishing could happen this week

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council will likely vote to impose the most severe restrictions ever on West Coast salmon fishing to protect California’s dwindling chinook stocks - a total ban on salmon fishing this year off the California and Oregon coasts.

The chinook salmon stocks in the Sacramento River, considered the backbone of the West Coast fishing industry, are the lowest ever in the industry. Times staff writer Eric Bailey reported on the dilemma last month.

Fewer than 60,000 chinook, known in fish markets and on menus of swank restaurants as king salmon, are expected to spawn this fall in the river. That’s less than half of what regulators say is needed to justify a nominal fishing season--and just a fraction of the 800,000 that arrived from the sea during the bumper crop of 2002, Bailey reports.

The cause? Federal scientists blame the anemic returns on a variety of factors, but have focused on poor ocean conditions, potentially linked to global warming, that have caused the chinook’s food sources to plummet.

-- Francisco Vara-Orta

If enacted by the National Marine Fishery Service, the closure would mark the first time salmon fishing has been banned off California since the first commercial fishermen arrived in 1848, Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns, told the Times.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s vote will happen sometime during their convention in Seattle this week.