[env-trinity] SF Chronicle- Fishery experts forecast banner salmon season

[Tom Stokely]

Fishery experts forecast banner salmon season
Peter Fimrite
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The salmon will be jumping off the coast of California this summer and, for the first time in years, anglers will be allowed to snag them in large numbers for placement on dinner tables, fishery managers announced Wednesday.

There are more chinook salmon swimming in the ocean right now than anyone has seen since at least 2005, according to projections released by biologists during the annual weeklong industry fret-fest that decides how many salmon are available to be reeled in along the West Coast.

Nobody knows for sure why there is a revival, but experts have cited several possibilities, including a two-year ban on fishing that ended last year, improved ocean conditions, abundant precipitation in 2011 and limits on water diversions.

The king salmon bonanza prompted the Pacific Fishery Management Council, which advises the federal government on how to manage local fish populations, to outline a series of options for commercial fishermen that all provide ample sport and commercial fishing throughout the spring and summer.

"We're going to have some good fishing this year thanks to a combination of better water management and a little help from Mother Nature," said Victor Gonella, president of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, a coalition of fishermen, environmentalists, restaurants and industry representatives. "Consumers can look forward to some of the best food on Earth - wild salmon, coming to a dinner plate near them soon."

The 14-member fishery council, made up of fishermen, biologists and industry representatives from California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho, meets at this time every year to plan the fishing season.

promising numbers

The council's experts said there are 820,000 chinook in the ocean now preparing to return to the Sacramento River system to lay eggs next fall.

Another 1.6 million chinook from the Klamath River are out there, according to the estimates - one of the largest populations of salmon on record.

"That is really good news. Those are really big numbers," said Harry Morse, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Game, which has a representative on the Fishery Management Council. "Everybody is looking at it in a very positive light."

The abundance forecasts are based largely on the percentage of 2-year-old salmon that return early to the river system. A large number of these so-called jacks are usually a good indication of how many fully grown fish will return the next year. King salmon generally return three years later to spawn at the spot where they were hatched.

fish tales

The problem is that projections have been wrong before, including last year. Fisheries experts estimated that there were 730,000 salmon in the ocean in 2011. They predicted 333,000 salmon would return to spawn in the Sacramento River in the fall, but only 114,741 showed up.

"They were off by a substantial amount," Morse said. "Once the salmon hit the ocean it becomes very hard to predict what is going to happen. It's not an exact science."

The council nevertheless outlined three fishing options based on those projections, all of which will give anglers off the California coast significant time to haul in chinook from April through at least October. The options would generally begin the commercial fishing season April 7 in the ocean around Humboldt County, San Francisco,Monterey and all the way to the Mexican border. The season would end in October or November, depending on which option is eventually chosen.

The regulations would require all salmon that are caught to be at least 20 inches long. The fishing season in the Klamath River zone would run from May through September. No fishing for coho salmon would be allowed south of the Oregon border.

Central Valley chinook, which come from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries, have historically made up the bulk of the salmon that fishermen catch along the California coast.

spawning peak

At the species' spawning peak in the river system, an estimated 769,868 fish laid eggs in 2002.

Then, in 2008, the salmon populations suddenly plummeted. That year, commercial fishing was banned off the coasts of California and Oregon. In 2009, only 39,500 fall-run chinook returned to spawn in the Sacramento, the worst showing on record. That year highlighted the worst three-year period in the watershed since records were first compiled in the 1970s, biologists said.

The council is expected to recommend one of the three options to the National Marine Fisheries Service within a month.

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. pfimrite at sfchronicle.com

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/08/MN471NHHMF.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/env-trinity/attachments/20120308/02404e92/attachment.html>