What started out as an unusual effort to get people talking about the peril of North Coast fishing families by using the eBay auction site erupted into a significant story in the state's biggest newspaper.

After struggling through a year with essentially no commercial salmon season and a Dungeness crab season that paled in comparison with recent years, Ronnie Pellegrini put her family up for adoption on eBay. The ad only got 184 hits while it was up.

But the ad -- which offered to update the winning bidder on the progress of the Pellegrini family's efforts to keep alive a long history of fishing in Eureka -- caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times when Pellegrini's mother e-mailed a reporter there.

The Times has a circulation of 775,000 and is a major presence on the Web.

”When I started, I didn't know if anybody would see it,” the Times-Standard was told by Pellegrini, who is a Humboldt Bay Harbor District commissioner.

Even as eBay management pulled the ad because it bucked a policy against soliciting donations, the Times reported, the paper was going to press. Pellegrini told the Times she wasn't looking for money, but rather to inform people about how fishermen here are teetering, an effort no doubt more effective through the big paper.

Fish biologists in Portland, Ore., are working the numbers this week to find out what kind of a salmon season the upcoming year will hold. It appears that there will be few 4-year-old salmon projected to return to the Klamath River this fall, the age of fish that commercial fishermen generally catch most. The good news is that 3-year-old fish may be plentiful, a positive sign for next year.

But even after a disaster declaration by the U.S. commerce secretary last year, Congress has so far failed to produce $60 million in aid pushed by U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

That has left a lot of fishermen wondering, if relief is uncertain for last year, what will this year bring?

John Driscoll can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll@times-standard.com.