By Peter Rice

Pilot staff writer

COOS BAY – South Coast fishing interests grabbed the ear of the federal government Monday night and yelled directly into it.

Their message: Stop the proposed clampdown on ocean salmon fishing.

And shoot a few sea lions while you're at it.

People packed a large conference room at the Red Lion Hotel here and faced off with part of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC). The atmosphere was one part pep rally, one part revival, and one part routine federal hearing. Applause frequently erupted after heated speeches.

The council, a federal advisory panel, is sponsoring three such regional hearings to collect comments on proposed changes to the salmon season ahead of meetings in Sacramento, Calif., next week. That's when the council will vote to recommend one of three options for the ocean salmon season, a season that plays a critical role in the South Coast economy.

The PFMC will choose between option 1, which allows about two months of sport fishing, option 2, which allows fishing on three holiday weekends, and option 3, no fishing at all. The one option for commercial fishing is the month of September, a major cut from years past, when the season stretched over the entire summer.

For most of the few dozen speakers at Monday's hearing, those options are bad, awful and terrible, in that order.

"It's like choosing which arm or leg you cut off," said Loren Hollinsworth, who runs a Coos Bay-area trucking company involved in fisheries.

"The options you present to me are totally unacceptable," said Ralph Dairy, a Brookings commercial fisherman.

One man read several e-mails from concerned restaurants that serve wild salmon. The panel of three hearing the comments – two PFMC staffers and one board member – listened, made notes and occasionally changed the tape in the recorder on the podium.

A representative of Congressmen David Wu and Peter DeFazio read a statement:

"Sport and commercial fishing account for, at most, only a miniscule loss of threatened salmon," the representatives wrote. "Other factors account for a majority of salmon loss: dams, irrigation, water warming and water degradation."

Harbor RV park owner Roger Thompson echoed the sentiment while highlighting the financial ripple effect on coastal towns.

"The trickle-down economics of sport fishing is much more than people understand," he said, adding, "we are not hurting the Klamath River at all."

Thompson is also on the board of the Klamath Management Zone Fisheries Coalition, a group that lobbies for generous fishing seasons.

Two Curry County commissioners – Lucie La Bonté and Ralph Brown – also addressed the panel.

"What's the federal government doing? What is going on?" La Bonté asked. "Why are we stopping fishermen when we've got dams on the river killing the fish?

Brown, a former member of the PFMC, said that extremely low returning numbers of Klamath fish in 1991 and 1992 had bounced back very well in subsequent years thanks to good river conditions. Letting people fish, he argued, wouldn't have any significant negative impact.

"You've heard these people. You know what's going to happen to the coast," Brown said.

Other speakers targeted alleged wrongs in the fishing regulation world. Some criticized the minimum acceptable number of returning Klamath Chinook – 35,000 – saying it was too arbitrary. Some took on the model used to estimate the returning fish populations. Others went after the practice of not counting hatchery fish as wild fish.

Two people got so worked up that they swore.

One called fishermen "real Americans."

And several went after pinnepeds as the chief source of the problem. Retired commercial fisherman Dan Morris even worried that they could pose a risk to humans.

"All it's going to take is one sea lion killing one kid, and Charleston will blow away," he said, apparently referring to the potential destruction of the town's tourist economy.

The comments will be forwarded to members of the PFMC board. Although that panel will choose a preferred option next week, that's not quite the end of the long process that decides an ocean salmon season. The Department of Commerce has the final say on the matter.

The threat to close coastal ocean salmon fisheries stems from the Klamath River. Scientists with the PFMC estimate that the number of non-hatchery fish coming back to the river this fall will drop below the acceptable floor of 35,000.

The low numbers, in this case 29,000, are critical because fishing in large swaths of the ocean is regulated based on the performance of the weakest runs of fish. So in an ocean filled with relatively abundant runs from such rivers as the Sacramento, Columbia, Rogue, Smith and Chetco, fishing is regulated with the weaker Klamath in mind.

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Reach Peter Rice at price@currypilot.com.

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Source:  http://www.currypilot.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=12514