The Pacific Fisheries Management Council offered three options for the 2006 season. The most liberal would allow fishermen to catch between 100,000 and 150,000 Chinook, or king, salmon in the ocean.

In an average to poor year, commercial fishermen and anglers catch 500,000 Chinook in the Pacific. A good year might see a harvest of 1 million or more fish. But the most restrictive option proposed Friday would ban Chinook fishing entirely from the Point Sur Lighthouse to near Astoria, Ore. A final decision on the season, which traditionally ran from April through September, won't be made until next month.

Fishermen describe the restrictions with invectives ranging from crippling to catastrophic. On Friday the council added a new wrinkle, suggesting that the commercial fleet -- but not the charter boats -- took more than three times the amount of Klamath River fish than previously estimated.

That surprise announcement added more vitriol and prompted California's industry representative on the council's salmon advisory subpanel, Duncan MacLean of El Granada, to resign in disgust.

"They basically told me they had to meet competing needs. And ours was the lowest on the list," said MacLean, who's spent 15 years on the advisory subcommittee. "They're willing to sacrifice an industry. I've never seen this process so politicized in my entire time of doing this. It's dirty. It's real dirty."

The problems center on the Klamath River, where three years of weak runs have federal fisheries managers seeking a full ban on any Chinook fishing from Point Sur near Carmel to near the Oregon/Washington border. Two federal laws mandate no fishing given current projections.

But the law allows for an emergency exemption to keep industry afloat through weak runs. And Friday evening the council, meeting in Seattle, appeared willing to offer at least a few crumbs for the 2006 season:

--No Chinook fishing in a 700-mile stretch of the Pacific.

--A season with half the fishing allowed in 2005, the most restrictive on record

--A season with a quarter of the fishing allowed in 2005.

The three options go out for public comment for about a month before the council, meeting in Sacramento in early April, picks from among the three for its final recommendation.

The National Marine Fisheries Service has final say on any season dates and can override the council's recommendations.

Frustrated fishermen said Friday federal regulators are systematically dismantling their industry as little or nothing is done on what they view as the root cause of the Klamath's decline: Poor habitat and water conditions in the river. 

"This is a little bit like throwing virgins in volcanoes," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations the largest trade association of commercial fishermen on the West Coast.  "Unless you know there's going to be survival of the fish in the river, it really doesn't matter what you do in the ocean."

But California officials on Friday stood by their decision to keep the fishing boats moored in harbor for the summer. Much work is being done to restore the river's health, they said. But right now they need every fish they can get back in the river.

More puzzling to the fishermen was the 3[1/2]-fold increase -- on the last day of the weeklong meeting -- of the commercial fleet's harvest estimate of Klamath Chinook.

"It's just nuts," Grader said. " We've had months and months to look at this... We don't really have a chance to determine whether this is valid."

Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com.