A pricey salmon season

Hankering for the succulent taste of local wild king salmon?

Then prepare to pay a pretty penny this season.

Because of very restrictive commercial fishing regulations enacted this year to protect depleted stocks in Oregon's Klamath River, local fishermen find themselves in a frustrating spot -- unable to fish when and where the salmon are most plentiful.

Last year, 5.5 million pounds of king (also known as chinook) salmon were landed off the California coast. This year, commercial fishermen are expecting half that or less for the season spanning May 1 through Oct. 14, said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

Short supplies mean higher prices that will fluctuate wildly. The roller coaster is expected to last all season.

At the start of the season, some Bay Area seafood markets were selling wild Pacific salmon for as much as $18.99 a pound for fillets. (Steaks are usually about $2 less per pound.) By the second week of May, fillet prices were down to about $14.99 a pound. By the third week, they were $10.99 to $12.98 a pound. Earlier this week, with winds keeping many boats docked, prices inched up again, and some seafood markets took to flying in fresh wild salmon from Alaska, and offering it for $12.99 to $13.99 a pound. Although prices do vary even during more normal seasons, fillets generally run about $10.99 a pound.

``This will be the worst year since 1992, when there was another perfect storm of conditions that caused federal regulators to make very restrictive seasons,'' said Jay Harlow, a Bay Area seafood expert and publisher of the Seafood Monitor, an online consumer newsletter. ``This is not going to be a year when local salmon will be either abundant or inexpensive in the market.''

To understand why, look to 2002. That year, much of the Klamath River's water was diverted to farms hit by drought. The lower water level led to 30,000 to 60,000 juvenile and spawning adult salmon dying that year, said Grader, of the fishermen's group.

Although the Sacramento River's salmon stocks are expected to be extremely abundant this year, federal regulations are designed to protect the weakest stock -- in this case, the Klamath, Harlow explained. As Klamath salmon return to spawn, they mix in the open ocean with Central Valley salmon returning to spawn in the Sacramento River. As a result, regulations designed to keep fishermen away from imperiled Klamath stocks are keeping them from the healthy Sacramento stocks, too.

Historically, most of the catch occurs in May and June from San Francisco to Point Arena, Harlow said. But this year, those waters are closed at that time. When those areas do open up on July 4, it's anyone's guess where the salmon will be. If local fishermen decide to take their boats farther south in hopes of snagging salmon, they may opt to sell their catch at ports down there rather than travel all the way back to the Bay Area.

``June will be a bust for us,'' Grader said. ``A lot of fishermen are fairly disgusted. Some are not even bothering to untie their boats.''

Even so, people still hunger for wild salmon, particularly after recent controversies over farmed salmon, which some studies indicate may contain PCBs and which many environmentalists fault for spreading disease and pollution in oceans.

``I've been pleasantly surprised by the reaction'' to the prices of wild salmon, said Dan Barsanti, vice president and seafood buyer for Race Street Foods in San Jose, a wholesaler that also operates a retail store. ``People are coming in, and they're still buying it.''

For wild salmon lovers who balk at the price, there is one other alternative: Make friends with a sport fisherman, Harlow said. With sport fishermen facing fewer restrictions than commercial ones, they're more apt to have a better season. Sport fishermen can give their catch away, but selling it is illegal.