This may be us soon....

[Mortician]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/12/SPU6VIR0O.DTL


03-12) 21:19 PST -- So this is it.

There are people in a conference room at a chain hotel in Sacramento working toward the decision of all our fishing lifetimes and many, many before ours and probably many after, too. Salmon fishing off our coast, for the first time in our vicious history, appears done. The option, as it is, before the Pacific Fishery Management Council amounts to no season, commercial or recreational, for salmon.

"It would take an emergency ruling to have any kind of salmon season," said Craig Stone, an Emeryville sportfishing center owner who serves on the salmon advisory sub-panel. "And it would be a hard, hard sell with the numbers as bad as they are."

Over the past couple days, the figure on salmon that arrived to spawn in the Sacramento River in 2007 somehow dropped from 88,000 to fewer than 64,000. At its peak in the Western history books, the number was more than 800,000 fish.

The decision on closing the season, or allowing even a partial season, will come next month.

Meantime, there is no salmon opener. The April 5 send-off is gone. The season already under way off Fort Bragg and Shelter Cove will close April 1. Seasons, commercial and recreational, scheduled to open in Oregon will not. There will be no season for salmon off the California and Oregon coasts in April.

Word got out Wednesday, as it does, and no one in the business could claim shock. The commercial interests, the end line of generations, held up their calloused palms.

Capt. Phil Bentivegna, himself a third-generation San Francisco charter-boat operator and salmon fisherman, listened to the news and got quiet, which he hardly ever does.

When he spoke he said, "We're done. What else can it mean?"

So this is it, he said, as if to say "finally." "I think a lot of us knew it would come, but in my lifetime?"

Same time the salmon advisory panel is meeting, the groundfish talks are under way. The rockfish season that fell to an emergency closure last year is being reviewed for this calendar, and the whole process is being held up by the salmon meetings.

"I'm not sure how much we can get done until they hammer out an option, or options, for salmon," said Bob Ingles, a party-boat skipper out of Pillar Point who serves on the groundfish advisory panel.

What Ingles knows is that the 180-foot depth restriction on groundfish allowed last year is gone. "We're back to 120 feet," he said.

What he also said is if the panel has any luck at all, there could be a rockfish season beginning in June and running through October. "Could be," he said, as he walked off toward another presentation and discussion.

This might very well be it.

Bay to Delta
Meantime to all this, there is the story of survival. Some will, most won't, and if that doesn't tear you through, you've never been on the water or known fishing.

Some fishermen are already out of the business, whether they know it or not. Some are fighting.

One was taking a nap when we called.

Dennis Baxter, who runs the charter boat New Capt. Pete out of Pillar Point, confirmed that he will be moving the boat from the coast to the South Bay's Oyster Point Marina, where he and the boat and hopefully some customers will fish for halibut starting April 1.

Why?

Baxter: "Hmmm? Oh. Well, God made me to kill fish. If I stay on the coast, I would be defying God. So I'm going to kill halibut."

You'd have to know Baxter to understand this as equal parts humor to sadness to seriousness to oddness, but he has a point, in that with no fishing reason to be on the coast between now and maybe May or June or never, the boats have to work and they have to fish somewhere.

"There is going to be a black cloud sitting over Half Moon Bay. I have a boat. I need to fish. At least this way I can fish," is how he eventually put it.

So halibut. You have to think this is not going to be a kind spring for flatfish in the S.F. bays. The halibut already are moving onto the sandy and muddy flats, less of them, maybe, than the number of boats already setting up drifts and tacking trolling lines.

Get the feeling, too, that jacksmelt will become wildly popular, and bat rays and the small bay sharks and yellow croaker and skates and bullheads and all the other things we piscatorially frowned on over all the years.

For us, we're going back where we started. No boats. No ocean. No romance of it all. There are hatcheries and they raise trout and those trout are placed in lakes.

You take one hook and bait it with some molded bait-like form and you take the other hook and run it through a worm, and you cast out and you wait, from a chair with a rod holder from shore.

Back where we started. Only this time, we're springing for the chair with the cup holders, which also accommodate a bottle of beer

 

[chris73]

Yup.

 

[Slabby20]

Here's an article that was in the New York Times

Collapse of Salmon Stocks Endangers Pacific Fishery

Published: March 13, 2008
Federal officials have indicated that they are likely to close the Pacific salmon fishery from northern Oregon to the Mexican border because of the collapse of crucial stocks in California’s major watershed.

That would be the most extensive closing on the West Coast since the federal government started regulating fisheries.

“By far the biggest,” said Dave Bitts, a commercial fisherman from Eureka, Calif., who is at a weeklong meeting of the Pacific Coast Fisheries Management Council in Sacramento.

“The Central Valley fall Chinook salmon are in the worst condition since records began to be kept,” Robert Lohn, regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Portland, Ore., said Wednesday in an interview. “This is the largest collapse of salmon stocks in 40 years.”

Although the Washington and Alaska fisheries are not affected, the California and Oregon ones produce “some of the most valuable fish, ones that are prized from West Coast seaports all the way to East Coast restaurants,” Mr. Lohn said.

The effect on salmon prices is not clear. Mr. Bitts said the effects on commercial and sport fishermen and their communities could run to millions of dollars.

On Wednesday the council closed several minor short-term fishing seasons off California and Oregon in connection with the salmon shortfall.

Counts of young salmon, whose numbers have dwindled sharply for two years, were the first major indication of the problem. The number of fish that survive more than a year in the ocean, or jacks, is a marker for the abundance of full-grown salmon the next year. The 2007 count of the fall Chinook jacks from the Sacramento River was less than 6 percent of the long-term average, Mr. Lohn said.

The Central Valley salmon runs are concentrated in the Sacramento River, the focus of a water struggle between farmers and irrigation districts on one hand and environmental groups and fishermen on the other.

Three years ago, some conservation groups challenged in federal court an advisory opinion by federal fisheries managers that let federal and state officials increase the water drawn from the Sacramento River Delta for farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and cities in Southern California.

The opinion by the National Marine Fisheries Service said the increase would not harm the three salmon species protected under the Endangered Species Act. The fall Chinook salmon were not under the act.

John McManus, a spokesman for Earthjustice, the group handling the suit, said lawyers in the case had been told that the judge would rule by the end of March.

Federal scientists reported this month that abnormal ocean conditions might be affecting the food chain of young salmon.