The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) at its meeting in Seattle today (April 10) voted to close recreational and commercial salmon fishing off the coast of California and most of Oregon this year.
The only exception to the closure will be a selective recreational fishery for coho salmon in Oregon, according to Dan Wolford, PFMC member and Coastside Fishing Club science director. The fishery closure will extend from Cape Falcon in northern Oregon to the U.S.-Mexico border.
This complete closure of fishing for chinook salmon is unprecedented since commercial fishing begin in California in 1848. The decision was made because of the "unprecedented collapse" of Central Valley salmon stocks. The Sacramento River chinook run, until recently the most robust West Coast salmon run, was the driver of West Coast salmon fisheries.
As recently as 2002, 775,000 adults returned to spawn. This year, even with all ocean salmon fishing closures, the return of fall run chinook to the Sacramento is projected to be only 54,000 fish.
"It was a very emotional day," said Wolford. "We until the end were considering the possibility of doing a genetic stock assessment of chinook stocks to be conducted by commercial fishermen in a catch and release fishery. However, the Council determined that the hooking mortality caused to Central Valley chinooks wouldn't be justified, since every fish is so important when the numbers of salmon are so low."
The Council also voted against any option for a fishery in the Klamath Management Zone (KMZ) on California's North Coast because of the estimated mortality of Sacramento River salmon that would occur. "We could not even risk the estimated mortality of 34 Central Valley chinooks that would occur if this fishery was approved," noted Wolford.
The Department of Fish and Game will also be recommending to the California Fish and Game Commission the closure of Central Valley rivers to any directed chinook salmon fishing this year, according to Wolford.
Senator Patricia Wiggins (D – Santa Rosa), chair of the Joint Legislative Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture, responded to today’s recommendation by the Pacific Fishery Management Council.
“We are experiencing a grave crisis with regard to our salmon fishery, and the council’s recommendation reflects the urgent need to do something now to return the fishery to sustainability," Wiggins said. "We owe that to these magnificent fish and to the salmon industry itself, a $100 million industry comprised not just of fishermen, but of Native peoples, tackle shops, processors, ice suppliers, restaurants, and tourism as well.”
Wiggins is the author of Senate Bill 562, which allocates nearly $5.3 in Proposition 84 funds to the state Department of Fish and Game, which will incorporate the funds into its coastal salmon and steelhead fishery restoration efforts. If signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, SB 562 would also enable the state to leverage up to $20 million in federal matching funds for salmon habitat restoration.
Wiggins has scheduled a hearing on the collapse of the salmon fishery on Thursday, April 17 at the state Capitol in Sacramento. The hearing of the Joint Legislative Committee on Fisheries & Aquaculture is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m.
The collapse of the Central Valley salmon stocks and the commercial and recreational salmon fisheries is a disaster that could have been prevented with proper management by the state and federal governments. Although Sacramento River chinook salmon suffer from an array of problems, the most significant are the massive export of water from the California Delta by the state and federal pumps and declining water quality. Meanwhile, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his corporate agribusiness and developer buddies are pushing for a peripheral canal and more dams that would allow the projects to export even more water in an estuary whose fisheries are already crashing.
On the Sacramento, where the salmon collapse is the immediate cause of the fishery closure, water managers diverted and pumped an all time record high of 6.4 million acre feet of water from the delta in 2005, the same year juvenile salmon that would have returned as adults in 2007 were attempting to migrate through the delta and out to sea, according to Earthjustice.
“What’s happened is no surprise given the massive water diversions from the Sacramento San Francisco Bay delta and the failure to address toxic discharges into this estuary, an ecosystem critical to the survival of the salmon run that drives our west coast fishery,” emphasized Grader. “It’s obvious that we’ve got to go to work to both save fishermen and fix the delta to bring back our fishery.”
