Low fish runs on Klamath River will reduce commercial harvest

By Glen Martin, San Francisco Chronicle
March 18, 2005

There are plenty of salmon in the sea this year, but commercial fishermen won't be allowed to catch many of them, and that's going to mean sky-high prices for seafood lovers.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council issued three alternatives for the approaching 2005 California and Oregon salmon season, and all basically call for slashing the commercial fishing season in half. The council will make a final decision by April.

Fishing industry representatives say any of the alternatives will mean a $100 million loss in projected profit to California's salmon fleet and stratospheric prices for wild salmon at the retail fish counter.

Consumers should expect to pay well more than $15 a pound, said Zeke Grader, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. Last year, the cost ranged from $9 to $11 a pound.

The proposed restrictions are a result of exceptionally low returns of mature chinook salmon to the Klamath River system. Government agencies typically reduce salmon seasons if they determine there aren't enough fish returning to ensure adequate spawning for future generations. Excluding the rivers of Alaska and British Columbia, the Klamath and its major tributary, the Trinity River, are second only to the Sacramento River as a producer of West Coast salmon.

Fishermen are particularly frustrated by the proposals because the waters off California are teeming with salmon. The Sacramento River will have abundant returns this year, said Grader -- probably the highest since Shasta Dam went up in 1945.

"Unfortunately, the Sacramento fish mingle with the Klamath fish out in the ocean," Grader said. "Even though most of the salmon out there are Sacramento fish, the council is concerned that too many Klamath fish could be caught during a full season."

The consequences of an excessive catch of Klamath salmon would be an even more drastic decline in the river's base population of fish.

Dave Bitts, a commercial salmon and crab fisherman and vice president of the federation of fishermen's associations, said fishermen will get to fish only about half as many days.and probably land fewer than half as many salmon as last year.

Last year, he noted, California and Oregon fishermen landed around 500,000 salmon.

"This year, 225,000 fish would be a best-case scenario under the shortened season," he said.

Grader said the restrictions come at a particularly inopportune time for commercial fishermen because wild salmon have made great inroads in the seafood marketplace, and prices are high.

"People prefer wild salmon over farmed salmon because of health and flavor issues," Grader said. "West Coast fishermen have finally started making a profit catching wild chinook salmon. Last year they got $3 to $4 a pound, which is very good."

Farmed salmon are Atlantic salmon, cousins of the five species of Pacific salmon but not native to the West Coast. Health concerns have recently been raised about farmed fish: Some tests have shown they have higher levels of toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, than wild salmon.

Luis Zuniga, a worker at the Tides Fish Market in Bodega Bay, said the restricted season would have a significant effect on the local seafood trade.

"People really wait for the wild salmon," Zuniga said. "We sell very little farmed fish here. The prices are going to be very high this year, but people will pay them."

Fishermen and environmentalists generally blame the meager Klamath salmon returns on low downstream flows from federal dams. Much of the water from the Klamath and Trinity rivers is diverted for agriculture.

In particular, they point to catastrophic incidents in 2002, when low flows and consequent warm water were suspected in massive die-offs of both adult and juvenile fish.

Chinook salmon typically follow four-year cycles. The fish returning this year to the Klamath hatched in 2002.

But Jeff McCracken, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that controls the dams, said the dams are operated with healthy fish populations in mind.

"All of our downstream releases adhere to biological opinions issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service," McCracken said.

Bitts said current flow schedules don't reflect biological realities.

"We also had big juvenile fish kills in 2003," he said. "We're not going to fix this problem until we increase the flows down the Klamath."