Cut Salmon Catch to the Bone, U.S. Panel Says

A federal advisory panel Thursday recommended a dramatic cutback in the West Coast’s commercial salmon season, stopping just short of an unprecedented ban that threatened to swamp the beleaguered fishing industry.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s decision comes after weeks of intense debate up and down the coast as sagging chinook salmon runs on the troubled Klamath River threatened to keep fishermen off the water entirely.

Under the restrictions, commercial fleets along a 700-mile swath of Northern California and Oregon would be forced to limp along with far fewer days than last year, which fishermen considered among the most restrictive in memory.

Fishing fleets would also be off the water during what are typically the most productive months of the summer, and face a weekly limit of just 75 fish. Some fishermen can catch that in less than a day.

Commercial fishermen said the truncated season could prove a death blow to hard-hit fleets and communities that count on salmon as an economic and cultural cornerstone. The fish will survive, they said, but the fishing industry may not.

“There’s a lot of people who are going to be hurt,” longtime Oregon fisherman Don Stevens told the council, his voice choking with emotion.

Duncan MacLean, a Half Moon Bay fisherman representing the California fleets, stormed out of the meeting and vowed to fight the restrictions all the way to Washington, where the Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service will have the final say.

“I’m going to do everything I can to torpedo this,” he said afterward. “There’s no way in hell I can make a living at 75 fish a week.”

Council members said they were boxed in and had to adopt tough restrictions because of problems on the Klamath.

“It’s the best we can do right now,” council member Darrell Ticehurst said. He called it “the most gut-wrenching decision I’ve had to make.”

National Marine Fisheries Service officials said they would support the council’s recommendation. They said the tough steps were needed to ensure that the Klamath keeps a sustainable commercial salmon fishery.

“Our concern from the start has been the level of risk” that continued fishing could pose on the Klamath, said Bob Lohn, the agency’s Northwest regional administrator. “It’s likely to be a very difficult year for commercial fishermen.”

Once among the most productive spawning grounds in the nation, the Klamath has been reduced to a trouble spot for salmon on the Pacific Coast.

The river, which emerges from the snowmelt of Oregon to empty in the sea north of Eureka, Calif., has endured five years of drought and a vitriolic water war in 2001 characterized as a fight between farming and fish.

The Bush administration began diverting more water to agriculture in 2002, and fishermen and environmentalists blame the lower river flows for the die-off that fall of more than 70,000 returning adult chinook.

But the unseen threat was to young salmon. Biologists say that with four hydropower dams blocking the Klamath’s natural currents and its historic flows cut by irrigation deliveries, a lethal parasite flourished, triggering a massive wave of juvenile salmon deaths.

Those that survived to reach the sea and grow are now returning in depleted numbers.

During the last two years, the number of naturally spawning adults dropped below the 35,000 floor set by federal regulations for the Klamath. This year, experts pegged the number at 24,300 without any commercial and recreational fishing.

Under the fishing restrictions approved by the Pacific council, about 21,100 naturally spawning chinook are expected to return to the river, enough to give federal regulators optimism that the Klamath salmon can rebound.

But fishermen say that they may now be endangered. And most blame the Bush administration, which they say hurt the fish by diverting too much water to Klamath Basin farmers and now is hurting fishermen by slicing the salmon season.

“They didn’t care about the fish when they took all the water out of the river. Now they say they care about the fish so they can hurt the fishermen,” Bill Murtha, a commercial fisherman out of Moss Landing on Monterey Bay, said after the meeting.

Murtha is one of many fishermen Thursday who suggested that a deeper political subplot was at work: They suspect the Bush administration would rather support the commercial aquaculture industry than commercial fishermen, who were critical of the agriculture diversions hatched in 2001.

“I feel we’ve been sold out,” Murtha said. “They’re going to sacrifice the small, independent fishermen for pen-raised fish.”

Lohn of the fisheries service said the agency’s hope is just the opposite.

“Our desire is to see a strong and sustainable commercial fishery,” he said. “The problem we face is caused by a drought of historic proportions in the Klamath Basin and a river system with problems a long time in the making.”

A quarter-century ago, more than 8,000 fishing vessels plied the waters off California and Oregon.

Today, there are fewer than 1,000 as catch restrictions and competition from farmed fish imported from Chile, Scotland and Canada have squeezed the commercial fleets.

Income from salmon caught off California and Oregon fell from a high of $243 million in 1988 to $57 million last year.

In a good year, commercial fishing in California and Oregon is a $150-million industry. The commercial mainstay is the silver-sided chinook offered in the supermarkets as king salmon, which sells for higher prices than farmed fish because of superior flavor and health benefits.

Even as Klamath salmon have slumped, several other West Coast rivers -- most notably the Sacramento -- have enjoyed bumper crops of chinook. But in the ocean the fish range far and commingle, raising the possibility that fisherman in far-flung spots could snag a Klamath salmon.