There's more than just salmon in the sea, right?

Oh please.

Spare me the falling sky.

Yes, there's almost certain to be sharply reduced salmon fishing off the Oregon Coast this summer south of Cape Falcon, near Manzanita. By the second week of April, we'll know just how reduced.

Klamath River chinook are way below the minimum necessary, and coho numbers are down, too.

Sure, the Pacific Fishery Management Council crunched out enough numbers for season options that will allow at least a little fishing. But the Secretary of Commerce still has veto power and the administration (which constantly seems to remember Oregon and Washington voted against President Bush) already has questioned why we're eating endangered fish anyway.

Perhaps most sadly, for sure we're not going to want to face those charter skippers, motel owners, restaurant waitresses and everyone else who gets our money on a salmon fishing trip and tell them to hope for tuna.

When the Klamath farmers scaled the fence a few years back and flooded their fields instead of our fish, at least the solution was just a barbed wire away.

Fishermen with signs can't go find a pocket of Klamath-free chinook salmon in the ocean and load them into their holds or coolers.

But you gotta be licking your chops if you're a July or August regular at Gold Beach, or a September troller in almost any coastal estuary (ever hit the Elk River after the sand plug blew out and the chinook blew across the beach?).

No commercial fishing for chinook means boom times in bays.

It's hard to imagine anyone actually following through on threats to abandon fishing plans at the coast because they can't catch salmon.

Not all of us go fishing just because we want to eat a salmon once in a while.

OK, some of us do that. Maybe a lot.

But not all.

We'll change some plans, but we're not gonna quit.

Some will go fish in the ocean for rockfish. That quota could get filled pretty quickly, though, and then that season will close.

Same for halibut. "Honest officer, I was fishing on the bottom for halibut when that chinook bit my herring. It was bleeding so badly I just knew it would die and go to waste."

When the halibut quota is sucked up, the albacore will be out there somewhere. But better not catch too many because they're starting to talk lower limits on those, too.

And alert the boat-towing companies (the U.S. Coast Guard, too). Fleets of fools always have a core of macho guys who think their 35 horsepower outboard can make it 50 miles and back.

Maybe we'll go crabbing over the bar, trying for something other than one of those jellied bay crabs. We'll lose a few pots out there, but what the heck.

A few of us may even fall overboard trying to pull traps in four-foot swells, but hey, that's what lifejackets are for, isn't it? Hope we remember to wear them.

And don't even get me started about all those boats trying to get close enough to a breaching whale for a close-up with a wide-angle lens.

The Coast Guard in Astoria and Ilwaco have to be nervous about all those boats moving up the coast to the mouth of the Columbia River, where there may actually be a salmon season.

Wonder how many of the newcomers will know to skirt north of Clatsop sands then cut to the south channel while crossing the world's most treacherous bar?

Or that it's a bad, bad idea to be at Buoy 10 on the ebb.

Oops, I'm sorry.

This was supposed to be an uplifting column about options, about how we've been through tight restrictions before and sailed into better seas the following year.

Didn't mean to point out so much gloomy fallout.

Go ahead; close salmon fishing.

I dare you.

Bill Monroe: 503-221-8231; billmonroe@news.oregonian.com