Back to California : Sea lions: In Seattle, they have devoured precious steelhead trout. A federal project returns six of the marine mammals to the Channel Islands. Will they stay?

The state of Washington, where residents have bumper stickers complaining about greedy Californians, went to extraordinary lengths Wednesday to get rid of a few.

With the help of the federal government, the state stuffed six California natives into a horse trailer, drove them nonstop to Santa Barbara and shipped them 48 miles out to sea to one of the Channel Islands off the Ventura County coast.

But the six would-be emigres--all California sea lions with an insatiable craving for Washington’s steelhead trout--may prove as difficult to get rid of as the hordes of smog-weary Californians who have migrated north.

Officials are afraid the sea lions will swim from their birthplace in the Channel Islands back to the Seattle area, where they’ve destroyed a large part of a run of steelhead trout during their last five winter migrations.

“The sea lions were born in California and raised in California, but, unfortunately for us, they decided to take a winter vacation in the Northwest,” said Joe Scordino, a deputy chief with the National Marine Fishery Service in Seattle. “We’re just cutting their tourism a bit short.”

The West Coast population of the sea lions, who once were hunted nearly to extinction for their pelts, has virtually exploded since they became a protected species in 1972, biologists said. These days, the creatures are causing problems from Seattle to San Francisco, where they have damaged part of a $2-million pier at Fisherman’s Wharf, but are not threatening any fish.

In Seattle, the beasts have eaten so many steelhead trout on their way to spawn in tributaries of Lake Washington that the run at the Ballard Locks canal has shrunk from about 4,000 fish annually to only 2,000, Scordino said. Two Indian tribes in Seattle, the Muckleshoot and the Suquamish, have federal treaty rights to fish for the trout and have pressured the state and federal government to do something about the massacre, he said.

“It’s pitting environmentalists against animal activists against commercial fishermen,” said Susan Ewing, a spokeswoman for the Washington Department of Wildlife. “And everybody has conflicting opinions about what should be done.”

Working together for the past five years, state and federal officials have tried detonating firecrackers underwater to scare the sea lions away. It worked for a couple of years, but the animals grew accustomed to the loud noise, said Gene Kruse, deputy regional director for the National Marine Fishery Service in Seattle.

So, the officials turned to feeding the sea lions dead fish laced with a non-lethal substance that makes them vomit, Kruse said. The wily marine mammals simply stopped eating the chemical fare after a while, he said.

Shooting the beasts with rubber bullets has had some effect, Kruse said, but a program that involved shipping them 200 miles south failed. About 29 of the 37 sea lions trucked south just swam back to their prime feeding ground in Seattle, he said.

“They’re just too smart for us,” Kruse said.

So, as a last resort, about $15,000 in federal funds was budgeted to cart the marine mammals farther south to their home ground in the Channel Islands. The sea lions’ annual mating season begins there in May, and officials are hoping the animals will stick around to get an early start, rather than heading 1,000 miles north to Washington for lunch.

If the six creatures stay put, government officials said they will consider trucking south the 30 or so remaining in Seattle as well. But the cost of hauling the 400- to 700-pound beasts may be prohibitive, Scordino said.

The state of Washington is also exploring whether it has a legal right under federal laws to kill the beasts based on the theory that they are hurting the public welfare by destroying the fish run, Scordino said.

But Scordino said he would much prefer it if the sea lions would simply go away. And he made this concession: “Californians are welcome in Washington--as long as they are not sea lions.”