Saving Seafood

CALIFORNIA: “Go fishing or go broke”: North Coast fishermen prepare for salmon season to be canceled

April 4, 2023 — California salmon anglers will be forced to consider other methods of income this year, as the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) plans to cancel this year’s salmon season in the state.

Humboldt fisherman Jake McMaster has had a difficult past few months after a short and unlucrative crab season, and now, the news that salmon season will be cancelled has him in troubled waters again.

“With the crab here that wasn’t the greatest, we would have depended on [salmon] pretty heavily, and we’ll just have to focus our attentions on other fisheries,” McMaster said.

Read the full article at KRCR

CALIFORNIA: California Salmon Stocks Are Crashing. A Fishing Ban Looks Certain.

April 3, 2023 — This week, officials are expected to shut down all commercial and recreational salmon fishing off California for 2023. Much will be canceled off neighboring Oregon, too.

The reason: An alarming decline of fish stocks linked to the one-two punch of heavily engineered waterways and the supercharged heat and drought that come with climate change. There are new threats in the ocean, too, that are less understood but may be tied to global warming, according to researchers.

Scientists and fishers had been braced for bad numbers. Conditions were terrible a couple of years earlier, when the salmon were young and tiny in low, overheated creeks and rivers in California. But as the fish counts came in and the models spit out figures, the numbers were even more dismal than expected.

Of all the salmon in California, fall-run Chinook were the last ones robust enough for commercial fishing. But this year, fewer than 170,000 are expected to return to Central Valley rivers. That’s down from highs of over a million as recently as 1995.

Read the full article at the New York Times

CALIFORNIA: It’s a bad year for California salmon. Here’s how it hurts the economy and environment

April 3, 2023 — State officials were supposed to take a conservative approach to approving salmon fishing season this year—and they did.

California’s fishing season had been scheduled to open April 1. Instead, as a result of low  projections, the season has been canceled.

Salmon provides more to the state than meets the eye.

“People don’t realize how much California’s a salmon state,” said Micheal Milstein, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesman. “The Sacramento River is one of the big salmon rivers off the West Coast.”

As commercial and  comes to a pause this year, here’s what to know

Read the full article at PHYS.org

CALIFORNIA: No California Salmon This Year: Water Diversion, Drought Caused Fish Stocks to Crash

March 20, 2023 — Most summer mornings at first light, Jared Davis is a few miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, motoring his charter fishing boat Salty Lady over the Pacific Ocean. His eyes sweep the horizon, looking for diving birds, but mostly he watches the screen of his dashboard fish-finder for schools of anchovies — a sure sign that salmon are near. When the signs look good, he throttles down to trolling speed and tells his customers to let out their lines.

“Drop ‘em down!” Davis calls out the window. “Thirty to 40 feet!”

When the bite is steady, the Salty Lady may have 20 customers on board, each spending $200 for the chance to catch salmon. On the best days, fishing rods bend double the moment the lines go down, and a frenzy of action ensues, often amid a hundred or more other boats. Hooked Chinook thrash at the surface, and the deck becomes strewn with flopping fish.

Last year, California’s commercial and recreational fishing fleet, from the Central Coast to the Oregon border, landed about 300,000 salmon.

But this year, Davis and other salmon anglers won’t be fishing for salmon at all.

Read the full article at Times of San Diego

Canceled California salmon season becomes financial burden for fishers

March 19, 2023 — Salmon season is closed for all of 2023. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife says the drought from recent years limited salmon’s ability to breed, and now there aren’t enough to open the commercial season. Salmon fishers say it is a massive financial burden.

“We have crews that depend on us, we have families to feed,” said Sarah Bates, a salmon fisher based in San Francisco. “I am not exactly sure what we are going to do this summer. It makes me nervous.”

Read the full article at ABC 7