Newport News-Times: Fishermen say minimal salmon season a disaster

Fishermen say minimal salmon season a disaster

By Joel Gallob Of the News-Times

April 12, 2006

Ray Monroe, a commercial troller from Pacific City, did the math to demonstrate the scope of the economic train wreck coming at the coast's salmon fishers for the 100 or so who attended the "call to action" meeting held Monday morning in Newport by Congresswoman Darlene Hooley and Congressman Peter DeFazio.

For the main run of the 2006 season, in June, July and August, north of Florence and south of Cape Falcon (in northern Tillamook County), under the newly-adopted regulations fishermen will be able to take 600 fish per boat, Monroe said. If the average fish weighs ten and a half pounds and the fishers receive $3 per pound, "that's $18,900 - max - total. What business can survive on that?"

Monroe, a member of the Oregon Salmon Commission, said the reduced season would be a hard hit for the 400 to 600 "small family-operated businesses" that constitute the coast's commercial salmon fishing industry. It would also mean, he said, less work on the docks for dockworkers, along with other economic impact.

The new season was set forth by the Pacific Fisheries Management Council, under virtual orders from the National Marine Fisheries Service, to reduce impacts on Klamath River fall Chinook in order to allow 21,000 spawners to return this season. It places the burden of trying to recover the Klamath fish squarely where it does not belong, Monroe and others argued. "If one group is to be held accountable for a problem that we cannot solve, we need financial remuneration," he said.

A press statement from the Pacific Fisheries Management Council indicated the 2006 season, even though it will involve "lowest ever" catch levels off California and Oregon, is intended "to provide for a catch of over 200,000 salmon in ocean recreational and commercial fisheries." That includes Chinook and both wild and fin-clipped hatchery coho.

It is also a fraction of a normal season (see related story).

What it all amounts to, according to Mark Newell, a Newport fisherman and small-business seafood processor, is about 5 percent of the 2005 season - which itself was reduced compared to prior years.

Newell said at the Pacific Fisheries Management Council meeting "we got ramrodded by NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service). Frank Lockhart said 'bring me a rock' (i.e., something solid to work with) several times," only to reject the numbers the PFMC suggested.

"Eventually, NMFS came back with the 21,000 returning spawners target, and we modeled the season for that. Then at the last minute they came up with a 75-fish cap. We could have modeled a better season, if we had known that was coming. That was not fair," Newell said.

Even with the reduced catch driving up the price per pound, Newell said many salmon fishers will go crabbing instead. Newell added he himself would fish crabs or black cod.

Henry DeRonden-Pos, who has fished for salmon out of Newport for 30 years, asked, "What if you don't have a crab permit?"

To him, the season "is a slap in the face. You cannot operate a $100,000 business on something like this. This is just one more humiliation. Those salmon in the Klamath River were our hopes and dreams, our kids' education, our mortgages. We are wards of the state now, and every year, the Feds degrade us. We're down to bare bones, we're the last cowboys, the last voice for the salmon. When the government gets rid of us, they'll have the ocean for themselves.

"They're talking about new restrictions, about taking the salmon season from us, and at the same time they're talking about turning the ocean into a fish farm," DeRonden-Pos said. "We are being driven off the ocean, here in the most beautiful city on the coast for the way of life that we created for ourselves. I would not trade it for the world. But I've got no place else to go. We used to have other options, like rock cod. Now all we can get is 900 pounds of rock cod, that's it. And every other species is closed to the small hook-and-line fisherman. We drag 16 barbless hooks around the ocean, and with that, we bring in the highest quality food there is to the American people."

South Lincoln County fisherman Lee Taylor was only a little less unhappy.

"We'll give it a try selling ling cod off the boat to the public, and a little salmon, and we'll get ready for albacore (tuna)," he said. "I'm not an albacore fisherman; I hate being forced into it. And I worry about the guys in small boats being forced out on the ocean - the greenhorns, the people more desperate than me. I don't have any boat payments to make."

Joel Gallob is a reporter for the News-Times. He can be reached at 265-8571, ext. 223 or joel.gallob@lee.net