Calif. Salmon Season Halted

Source: SF Chronicle

"Calif. chinook fishing season halted for again"

California's commercial chinook salmon fishing season will be called off again after a record low number of the fish returned to the Sacramento River to spawn last year, federal fisheries managers announced Wednesday.

The decision by the Pacific Fishery Management Council will almost completely curtail commercial fishing in Oregon as well, but allows the sport and commercial seasons in Washington to proceed at an almost normal level.

The halt to California's salmon fishing season marks the second year in a row that the council has completely halted commercial angling for natural and hatchery chinook or "king" salmon.

A 10-day sport season in California will be allowed from Eureka to the Oregon border from Aug. 29 to Sept. 7, said Chuck Tracy, salmon staff officer for the council.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/04/08/state/n154751D22.DTL&tsp=1

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Trust the Chronicle to come up with an unintelligible headline. :banghead:

and the papers wonder why readership declines....

It's an AP article, BTW.

are born

From the article: "Chinook salmon hatch in freshwater streams and rivers, then migrate to the ocean where they feed and grow, only to return to spawn in the fresh waters in which they were born."

Lots of things spawn in the salt marshes, but Chinook aren't among them.

Although the marsh complex is degraded, it provides habitat for a number of threatened or
endangered species including the California clapper rail, California black rail, salt marsh
harvest mouse, San Pablo song sparrow, Sacramento River winter-run chinook salmon,
Steelhead trout, Sacramento splittail (fish), Delta smelt (fish), and Mason's lilaeopsis (plant).
The former salt ponds in the Napa-Sonoma Marsh Complex provides habitat for large
populations of waterfowl and shorebirds.

I did not realize they didn't get there until adulthood

Along most branches of the Sacramento and SJ rivers, the dams cut the fish off from their native spawning beds. Spawning beds lower on the river were destroyed by dredging, draining, and levy construction. Only a tiny fraction of the natural salmon spawning beds still exist in the area today.

I could tell stories. I am now living on a property that has a Coho habitat on it. My previous property was in Oregon, and I actually got in the streams along with the salmon. What an experience. However, it was sad to see just a handful of fish, whereas no doubt in previous decades those steams were teaming with fish. As I moved into that town, I went across a bridge, and the first thing I saw as I came into town was a river full of brown water. Dirt, from logging. Totally obscured that entire river. And before that, I lived in Humboldt county. I would spend time on those rivers, and there were nearly no fish at all. I talked with a local woman who was about 90 years old, and she said that around 1970 the rivers went from having the appearance that one could literally walk across them on the backs of all the fish, to no fish at all. Once again, thank you logging. All of this translates to people buying wood. Building houses. Booming economies. Am I being clear? I've been saying the same thing since I arrived here. And to be honest, I want to ignore the negative stuff in life. I've spent my entire life watching it. But how can we ignore something so drastic? I saw those rivers with no fish, and it frightens me. And here is why it scares me. It says that we cannot go back. We cannot survive off the land. We must go forward with modern living. We can only survive off artificially sustained farming. Tell me I'm wrong. I don't want to be right. I want to be cheerful like all of those people who don't know this stuff. Most people are in an office every day. I have been on the shores of rivers, watching. In the forests, looking at the logging. Feeling the heat where there are no trees.

Oh well. I'm a downer.

Therefore, I shall make up for this with this-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDRQpdhlR3s

Especially on the Columbia/Snake system of Washington and Idaho. American Rivers has been a huge advocate of removing obsolete or otherwise pointless dams, especially those on the Snake. I would love to see that river free-flowing along its entire length.

Trawlers are allowed so much in salmon by-catch when fishing for other species.

And the North Pacific Fishery Management Council wants to increase the amount of by-catch the trawlers can have, which will be devastating to the Alaska fishing industry.

http://www.divasblueoasis.com/diary/514/fishery-council-throws-yukon-and-western-alaska-residents-under-the-bycatch-bus

But I have no proof to back up that claim. It just seems that we have polluted the waterways, whereas dams decrease the intensity of water flow.

Yeah, it all comes back to population. This is the baseline of all of the ecological damage. The one thing that so few people are willing to look at. And I reason it is because of something I call sexual greed. Most people have this desire to have kids. It's natural, but we are long past it being beneficial. Now it's detrimental. And it's too late. And it's why I'm so pessimistic. Because it has limited our choices in how we can go about remedying our situation.

Dams are the big problem inland.

And void agreements they have with Alaska's native population on subsistance fishing.

http://www.divasblueoasis.com/diary/514/fishery-council-throws-yukon-and-western-alaska-residents-under-the-bycatch-bus

Another link: