California Salmon Archives - Page 2 of 3

CALIFRONIA: Sonoma County’s fishing community facing uncertain future with potential salmon season closure

March 27, 2024 — In 2024, California’s ocean salmon fishing industry stands at a critical juncture. The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC), cognizant of the challenges salmon populations face due to years of drought and environmental pressures, has laid out three potential paths for the salmon fishing season off California’s coast. These options range from limited fishing opportunities to a complete closure for the second consecutive year—a decision with profound implications for Sonoma County’s fishers, who grapple with the aftermath of previous closures and ongoing environmental and regulatory challenges.

Ogg also holds significant roles in various other environmental and fishing organizations. He serves on the Board of Directors for the California Salmon Council, is a director in the Bodega Bay Community Fishing Association, and is a member of numerous advisory councils, including the Cordell Banks Advisory Council, the Dungeness Crab Task Force, and the Gulf of the Farallons Advisory Council.

Read the full article at Sonoma County Gazette

CALIFORNIA: Gov. Newsom releases new plan to save California salmon

January 31, 2024 — There’s a newly restored wetland at the edge of Prairie Creek, a stream that crosses ancestral Yurok land in Northern California’s Redwood National Park. The site is humble at first glance: an expanse of mud along the streamside, where starts of native vegetation dot the ground, and quiet pools branch off from the main flow of the creek. But this carefully rebuilt backwater holds an array of rare young fish. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom stood by as researchers pulled juvenile chinook and coho salmon along with steelhead and cutthroat trout from the water and displayed them in a clear plastic box.

Newsom and his entourage paid a visit to this area to see salmon restoration in action – and to announce a sweeping new plan intended to protect California’s iconic fish. The state’s once-abundant salmon have been devastated by sediment pollution from logging, overfishing and massive habitat loss due to decades of dam construction. As summer temperatures soar and snowpack dwindles due to human-caused climate change, there’s increasingly less of the cold water the remaining salmon need to survive.

Read the full article at High Country News

Commercial fishing groups sue 13 US tire makers over rubber preservative that’s deadly to salmon

November 9, 2023 — The 13 largest U.S. tire manufacturers are facing a lawsuit from a pair of California commercial fishing organizations that could force the companies to stop using a chemical added to almost every tire because it kills migrating salmon.

Also found in footwear, synthetic turf and playground equipment, the rubber preservative 6PPD has been used in tires for 60 years. As tires wear, tiny particles of rubber are left behind on roads and parking lots, breaking down into a byproduct, 6PPD-quinone, that is deadly to salmon, steelhead trout and other aquatic wildlife when rains wash it into rivers.

“This is the biggest environmental disaster that the world doesn’t quite know about yet,” said Elizabeth Forsyth, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which is representing the fishing groups. “It’s causing devastating impacts to threatened and endangered species.”

The Institute for Fisheries Resources and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Wednesday against Goodyear, Bridgestone, Continental and others.

In an emailed statement, Bridgestone spokesman Steve Kinkade said the company would not comment on the lawsuit, but that it “remains committed to safety, quality and the environment and continues to invest in researching alternative and sustainably sourced materials in our products.”

Read the full article at ABC News

CALIFORNIA: Half Moon Bay fishermen reeling from lost income amid salmon fishery closure

September 21, 2023 — Commercial salmon fishing season has been closed in the state of California for the past several months and fishermen in Half Moon Bay are feeling the impacts.

At Half Moon Bay’s Pillar Point Harbor, it’s so quiet even the sea lions are bored.

“It’s quiet, you look at this harbor and it’s just empty, there’s no activity,” Porter McHenry, a commercial fisherman said.

McHenry says at this time of the year, from May to October, he would typically rely on salmon.

“There’s going to be nothing until crab season,” he said.

Back in March, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said the drought from recent years limited salmon’s ability to breed and that there weren’t enough to open the commercial season this year.

Read the full article at ABC 7 News

CALIFORNIA: California’s Salmon Are Teetering on the Brink

July 12, 2023 — Arron Hockaday Sr. remembers fishing for salmon with his father in the late 1970s. Back then, it wasn’t just the number of salmon running up Northern California’s Klamath River that impressed him. It was the size.

“Back then, gosh, it was amazing to see the fish when the fish ran during the fall,” says Hockaday, a traditional fisherman and council member of the Karuk Tribe. “The salmon were huge.” On average, he says, you could catch fish ranging from 40 to 50 pounds—although members of his grandparents’ generation were known to catch 100-pound Chinook salmon at Ishi Pishi Falls, the tribe’s sacred fishing grounds. “Nowadays, our average is anywhere from 15 to maybe 25 pounds. We catch a 30-pounder and that’s a hog, that’s a big fish.”

A slow-motion disaster for tribes, commercial fishermen and conservationists, the decline of California’s once-abundant salmon population has been unfolding for decades. The crisis has its roots in decisions about the state’s water use made a century ago and, like so many stories of water wars in the West, it has pitted stakeholders against one another in a seemingly zero-sum contest over a dwindling natural resource.

The outlook is grim, but there are bright spots. As a future of increasingly hot and dry weather hangs over the state, can change come quickly enough to save the imperiled salmon from extinction?

Read the full article at Modern Farmer

California seeks federal help for salmon fishers facing ban

April 8, 2023 — California officials want federal disaster aid for the state’s salmon fishing industry, they said Friday following the closure of recreational and commercial king salmon fishing seasons along much of the West Coast due to near-record low numbers of the iconic fish returning to their spawning grounds.

Dealing a blow to the salmon fishing industry, the Pacific Fishery Management Council unanimously approved the closure Thursday for fall-run chinook fishing from Cape Falcon in northern Oregon to the California-Mexico border. Limited recreational salmon fishing will be allowed off southern Oregon in the fall.

Much of the salmon caught off Oregon originate in California’s Klamath and Sacramento rivers. After hatching in freshwater, they spend an average of three years maturing in the Pacific, where many are snagged by commercial fishermen, before migrating back to their spawning grounds, where conditions are more ideal to give birth. After laying eggs, they die.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

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 salmon 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 sport fishing 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