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By Peter Rice
Pilot staff writer
March 1, 2006
Odds are you haven't met Ralph Dairy, but if you've ever eaten salmon at such area establishments as Smuggler's Cove, or picked up a filet at the grocery store, you might just have eaten a fish he brought in from the Pacific.
Tuesday, he was on the ocean looking for crab on the Anita Lynn, but come summer, the hunt for more Chinook salmon will be on.
At least that's how it's supposed to work. This summer, he's expecting to be doing something different.
"Probably looking for a job," he said.
When it comes to the ocean salmon season, a key economic driver for coastal fishing and tourist economies, the future doesn't look good.
A team working for the Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC), the federal agency that regulates ocean fishing, recently confirmed what people had been fearing since preliminary numbers came out in December: The number of non-hatchery fish coming back to the Klamath River this fall will drop below the acceptable floor of 35,000. Since Chinook return to their home rivers anytime between one and six years after leaving, scientists can estimate return numbers for the following year based on the current year's figures.
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.
The federal government, through the PFMC, is poised to clamp down on ocean salmon fishing this year, possibly even shutting off the season altogether. The final decision will come in April, but between now and then, fear is filling the knowledge vacuum.
"It's just going to be economically devastating to the whole Oregon Coast," Dairy said.
"It's going to be a significant impact," added fisheries consultant Keith Wilkinson, who sits on a panel that advises the PFMC. When news of a potential shutdown gets out, he said, "there are folks that are immediately changing their vacation plans."
Shutting off the salmon season might also have an impact on other fisheries such as ground fish, as fishermen seek alternative catches.
It's not clear just what the PFMC may choose to do. The options, according to the agency's salmon staff officer Chuck Tracy, vary from doing a repeat of last summer's season, which featured a one and a half month no fishing gap, to a total shutdown.
The affected area isn't clear either. It could be in the stretch of ocean from Cape Mendecino, Calif., to Cape Blanco. It could even be a bigger piece of ocean from Tillamook to Monterrey, Calif. And whatever restrictions come up could apply differently to sport and commercial outfits, Tracy said.
"What will happen is just a matter of conjecture," Wilkinson said.
Two Brookings residents – Jim Welter and Bob Crouch – will be traveling to an upcoming PFMC meeting in Seattle to lobby for as much fishing as can be had.
"We're trying to salvage anything we can out of it," said Crouch, who will be representing the Klamath Management Zone Fisheries Coalition, a group that pushes for coastal fishing interests.
As the political process of deciding the salmon season plays out, an ongoing tug-of-war over the Klamath River, along with the argument over why its fish do so poorly, continues to fester on the sidelines.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation operates a water project in the upper Klamath basin area that diverts part of the river to farms for irrigation. Coastal fishermen maintain that this diversion kills salmon by raising the temperature of the water and contributing to the severity of a parasite infestation.
Upriver irrigators, for their part, see efforts to increase the flow of the river as an attack on farming.
In one editorial published on the Web site of the Klamath Water Users Association, executive director Greg Addington wrote that water releases were based on "questionable science" and asked whether coastal salmon were really threatened at all.
While all eyes are currently on the PFMC, a fishing shutdown has the potential to infuriate coastal communities and reignite the political fireworks between coastal fishermen and inland farmers.
It's happened before, Wilkinson said, but in the end, the Pacific Northwest environment has resolved the issue by doing what it does best.
"There's always the same solution. It rains again," he said. The more abundant water years help the fish and leaves enough for the farmers upriver. The heavy rains of the last several months might actually be a step in that direction, he added.
"By the time the fisher-dependent communities have suffered enough and begin to exercise some of their political concerns, nature has resolved the issue," Wilkinson said.
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Reach Peter Rice at price@currypilot.com.
