Fishery to be shut down this year
Most summer mornings at first light, Jared Davis is a few miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, motoring his charter fishing boat Salty Lady over the Pacific Ocean. His eyes sweep the horizon, looking for diving birds, but mostly he watches the screen of his dashboard fish-finder for schools of anchovies — a sure sign that salmon are near. When the signs look good, he throttles down to trolling speed and tells his customers to let out their lines.
“Drop `em down!” Davis calls out the window. “Thirty to 40 feet!”
When the bite is steady, the Salty Lady may have 20 customers on board, each spending $200 for the chance to catch salmon. On the best days, fishing rods bend double the moment the lines go down, and a frenzy of action ensues, often amid a hundred or more other boats. Hooked Chinook thrash at the surface, and the deck becomes strewn with flopping fish.
Last year, California's commercial and recreational fishing fleet, from the Central Coast to the Oregon border, landed about 300,000 salmon.
But this year, Davis and other salmon anglers won't be fishing for salmon at all.
In response to crashing Chinook populations, a council of West Coast fishery managers plans to cancel this year's salmon season in California, which will put hundreds of commercial fishermen and women out of work in Northern California and turn the summer into a bummer for thousands of recreational anglers.
Last year, the industry's economic value was an estimated $460 million for fish sales and related businesses, including restaurants, tackle shops, private fishing guides, campgrounds and other services. Salmon season usually runs from May through October.
The closure, Davis said, “is going to be devastating to my business.” He said he will “try to scrape together a season” by targeting other species, like rockfish, lingcod, halibut and striped bass, but generating interest in catching these fish will be a challenge.
“Our customers want salmon,” he said, adding that last year, his customers caught roughly 2,000 Chinook.
Davis, 53, who has fished all his life, said the thrill of salmon fishing never grows old. “There's nothing else like a wide-open salmon bite,” he said.
Only in two previous years — 2008 and 2009 — has California's salmon season been shut down completely. That closure came as the numbers of spawning fish returning to the Sacramento River, the state's main salmon producer, crashed to record lows.
Now California's Chinook runs have collapsed again.
Just 62,000 adult fall-run Chinook returned last year to the Sacramento River to spawn, the third lowest return on record and only half of the fishery's minimum target.
Runs on the Klamath River, in far-northern California, also have plunged, hitting 22,000 spawning adult fall-run Chinook last year, the fourth lowest return in 40 years. Native American tribes rely on the Klamath River's salmon for traditional foods and ceremonies.
What's ailing the fish, scientists and state officials say, is a
variety of factors, primarily in the rivers where salmon spawn. Large volumes of water are diverted for use by farms and cities. Combined with drought, this causes low flows and high water temperatures, which can kill salmon eggs and young fish. Vast tracts of floodplains and wetlands, where small fish can find food and refuge, have also been lost to development and flood control projects.
Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the quantity and quality of river water appear to drive salmon numbers.
“No doubt, water management is an issue, both allocation and delivery,” Bonham said.
Chinook in the Sacramento River have experienced almost complete spawning failures in the past several years. This has left a generational gap in the population that the fishing industry is now facing.
“We're looking at the runs from the juveniles that went to sea three years ago, and these are the fish missing in action,” said Glen Spain, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, which represents commercial fishers in 17 West Coast ports.
The collapse of salmon runs has stoked tensions between the fishing and agricultural communities.
“The real issue is the ability to divvy up a set amount of water between two different entities, fishermen and the farmers,” said Dick Ogg, a commercial fisherman in Bodega Bay.
`Some of us will survive, some won't'
The Pacific Fishery Management Council announced March 10 that it is choosing between three fishing season alternatives. Each would close the 2023 season, with the possibility of a reopening in 2024. The final decision will come during a session that begins April 1.
Many fishermen and women support the closure — despite the impact on their own finances — because there are too few salmon left to catch.
“We don't have the abundance to support any harvest,” said Sarah Bates, of Oakland, who has fished commercially in coastal waters for 15 years.
Scientists estimate that 169,800 Sacramento River fall-run Chinook — the most abundant of the river's four Chinook runs and the mainstay of the fishery — are now swimming off the coast. It's the lowest estimated population since 2008.
Until the 1980s, California's salmon boats routinely brought to port nearly a million fish per season. The record catch — 1.4 million salmon — was in 1988. Recent years have seen catches of between 100,000 and 300,000.
As salmon populations have shrunk, California's fishing fleet has shrunk, too. Nearly 5,000 commercial boats pursued California's Chinook in the early 1980s. Now only 464 active boats are fishing commercially, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Plus, the state's recreational anglers took about 98,000 trips last year and caught 89,000 salmon.
Still, a substantial salmon industry remains. A 2010 analysis estimated its worth at $344 million in direct fish sales and related economic activity. Cameron Speir, a U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service economist, said with inflation, that would bring the 2022 value to an estimated $460 million, although no formal estimates have been made.
The last time the fishing season was closed, fish businesses received federal disaster relief money, which is likely this year, too. Larry Collins, president of the San Francisco Community Fishing Association and formerly a salmon fisherman, said adequate compensation for the industry would amount to about $450 million. Getting it, he said, will require a plea to Congress.
Bates said a season closure will take away “the vast majority” of her annual income.
She said she can catch other fish to help make ends meet, though none of the other options — like rockfish, sablefish and halibut — provides the financial rewards that salmon fishing does.
“This will probably be pretty devastating for our local fleet,” she said. “Some of us will survive, some won't.”
Kenny Belov, a wholesale fish supplier in San Francisco who bought 25,000 pounds of California Chinook last year, said no other local fish species commands more excitement than salmon.
“Salmon outsells everything,” said Belov, co-owner of TwoXSea.
But with a season closure imminent, Belov has already purchased futures in 31,000 pounds of yet-to-be-caught Alaskan coho. He expects to sell more salmon this summer than in previous years simply because Alaskan coho is cheaper than local Chinook, which is also called king salmon.
Eric Stockwell, a naturalist and ocean kayak fishing guide based in Humboldt County, said he wants a season closure even though it will put him out of work. He called it long overdue, given the recurring poor returns in the Sacramento and Klamath rivers.
“It's a shame seasons have been allowed even though we haven't reached the minimum escapement spawning goals,” Stockwell said.
Fishing, after all, has impacts on the salmon population, too.
Last summer, California's commercial salmon fishers had an unexpectedly good year, catching two to three times more fish than managers expected. If the overall population is as low as scientists think it is, that harvest took a big chunk from the population when it was already down.
`Without salmon, we are not Yurok people'
For many Californians, wild Chinook salmon is a rare treat. For members of California's indigenous tribes, it is a core element of their culture and diet.
In the Klamath River basin, the Karuk, Hoopa and Yurok tribes fish for Chinook salmon for subsistence.
“The health of our people depends on having salmon,” said Bill Tripp, the Karuk Tribe's director of natural resources and environmental policy. “Their survival in the basin is imperative. If they disappear, we could lose our ability to survive here.”
Tribes set their own catch limits, but they tend to reflect the population estimates of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, according to Barry McCovey Jr., who directs the Yurok's fisheries program.
In 2017 — a bad year for Klamath salmon — the Yurok forfeited their subsistence catch, taking just a handful of salmon for traditional ceremonies. This year's allocation has not yet been set, but McCovey said it will probably be another meager season for the tribes.
The Karuk, who live along the middle-lower reaches of the Klamath River, traditionally fished for salmon using dip nets.