Fishing Frenzy : Salmon Lingering Off Santa Barbara Providing a Rare but Welcome Catch

Not that they’re complaining, but folks around the local sportfishing landings can’t help but wonder how much longer the salmon are going to stay.

“It’s almost like they’re confused,” said Amalie Abbott, owner of Harbor Village Sportfishing in nearby Ventura. “They start to leave and then they come back. We think, probably, they’re starting to go home, and there’s nothing to eat (on the way) so they’re coming back.”

It’s been nearly two months since the salmon invaded these waters, providing fishermen running out of Channel Islands, Ventura and Santa Barbara harbors with rare opportunities to catch a fish normally not found in such numbers so far south.

“We get salmon every year,” said Merit McCrea, owner-operator of the Seahawk, which runs out of Santa Barbara’s Sealanding. “But never this many--and they never stick around this long. We usually get them for about a week or so.”

Indeed, the local ocean has been serving up so much salmon that some people have run out of ways to deal with them.

“I’ve had it barbecued, had it poached . . . the other day I just took a fillet and ate it raw,” said Randy King, an Ojai resident who has been out five times in his private boat and each time bagged his two-fish limit. “I’ve also been passing a lot of it around. You get a little tired of it.”

One wouldn’t get that impression watching the cars line up at the harbor launch ramps on weekend mornings. Or witnessing the chaotic scenes on the water.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” McCrea said. “There are hundreds of boats out on Saturdays. We’ve had guys run over our lines, drift into our boat. We’ve had them break down and drift into our boat, and we had to hold them off with gaffs.”

Wes Boyle, second-skipper of the Seahawk, is credited--he credits himself, anyway--with catching the first salmon of the year in the Santa Barbara area on Feb. 1.

“I thought it was a white sea bass,” he said.

It was a Chinook, or king salmon. The fish kept coming and eventually they were here in force. And, it seems, they are here to stay for a while.

Alan Baracco, a Department of Fish and Game biologist from Sacramento, said the phenomenon is unusual in that the salmon have traveled south of their typical geographic range--usually from about Monterey north.

He said they have found ideal conditions in which to feed before moving on and eventually spawning in the Bay Area river systems in which they were born, such as the Sacramento and San Joaquin.

Salmon prefer ocean water between 50 and 56 degrees. The water off Santa Barbara has been in that range for two months and is inching slowly upward. On Monday, readings were in the 54-degree range.

The fish range in age from 2 to 3-plus years and weigh between 10 and 20 pounds. Salmon reach maturity at about 4.

“The majority will return to spawn this fall, but some 10-20% will require an additional year of ocean growth before they are old enough,” Baracco said. “When the water warms, they will gradually work their way north.”

Meanwhile, skippers and anglers have been experimenting with fishing for something they haven’t had much practice with.

In the Bay Area, where sizable salmon runs occur annually, the popular method is “mooching,” or slow-trolling bait on a rig attached to a heavy lead weight that, in some instances, breaks free and sinks to the bottom when a fish strikes.

Here, skippers and anglers are less inclined to employ such a method. Trolling a one- or two-pound lead weight, they say, gets to be a drag.

Private boaters, such as King, have been catching their two-fish limits casting and trolling shiny Krocodile lures.

Those aboard party boats have been doing fine using light line and a small sliding sinker or split-shot weight. “We’ve been fishing them just like bass,” Abbott said.

McCrea was one of the first to try fishing for salmon with the anchor down rather than drifting.

“We’ve been finding bait on the meter in the same places, so I came up one morning and found an area where there were three or four different spots of bait,” he said. “We put the hook (anchor) in the middle of them and caught a couple of fish right away. So we sat there and about every 15-20 minutes the fish would come through and we’d catch a bunch more.

“I passed the word to the boats down the coast to see how they did with it and they did fairly well, but I don’t think they’re sitting long enough. I think they’re getting antsy.”

Skippers and landing operators are highly competitive when something new and popular turns up, and they are not apt to sit idly by while others catch all the fish.

“We try to get out there first because the first boats usually catch the most fish,” Abbott said. “We get out there first and circle the salmon like ‘Blazing Saddles.’ Circle the wagons. We get them pretty much locked in.”

Life won’t be the same here when they leave.