A lack of salmon frustrates fishing enthusiasts in Central California

By Carl Heintze

I have two friends who have spent part of their retirement years fishing. During salmon season they drive over Highway 17 to Santa Cruz, climb aboard their powerboat and head out to sea to catch fish. They occasionally catch other fish, but they're really after salmon, one of the best eating fish to be found either in fresh water or the sea.

Mostly luck has been with them, and over the years they have often come back with their limits, both to enjoy themselves and to share with friends. In years past they also now and then have had to share their catch with sea lions who have a tendency to gulp a hooked, and thus semi-immobile, salmon whole, leaving my friends frustrated and angry at the sea lions.

"Fur bags," as one of my friends calls them.

But it hasn't been the sea lions that have gotten their attention during the last few years. Rather it is the salmon themselves, or, I should say, the lack thereof. There aren't any.

Day after day my friends and a lot of other salmon fishermen, both amateur and professional, have gone looking for salmon and found none. No one is quite sure why this is so. One theory is that the waters of the Pacific off California have warmed, sending the salmon farther north.

Commercial fishermen are still catching salmon in the waters off the Northwest and Alaska, although certainly not in record numbers. And salmon fishing off Alaska, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia also is a matter of political disagreement. Canadian fishermen have alleged American fishermen are blocking their catches and vice versa.

But that's another story. We're talking here about sport fishing for salmon off the Central California coast.

The many salmon farms now working on the West Coast have affected the "Wild" salmon fishing also. A salmon farm is created by hatching salmon eggs in a specific body of water, letting the fingerlings migrate to sea down a natural stream and then harvesting them as the salmon come back to their only known home to spawn. Most of them come back where they started, just like wild salmon, and that easy take has made salmon farming the easiest and least risky way to catch them.

Whether or not it has had its effect on the wild salmon my friends are seeking is a matter of some dispute, just like a lot of other things about catching salmon. Certainly ocean temperature has much to do with where fish, including salmon, go to feed. The phenomenon known as El Nino, the shifting current off South America that either affects or reflects changes in global weather, also influences fishing in the Pacific. But just how it affects the Pacific's fisheries and why is a lot less clear than knowing it exists.

There also is a school of thought that holds that the Pacific salmon fishery is or has been fished out. That is, so many fishermen have been catching so many fish that there are none left to breed and make fish for the next year's harvest. There is, of course, a salmon season, a time when it is legal to catch fish, and there's also a daily limit on how many can be caught, but conservationists like to point out that there are many more fishermen than there used to be, limits or not.

And certainly there is evidence that over fishing can have serious, even disastrous effects on fisheries. The fishing banks of the Atlantic, which once teemed with cod today are in danger of disappearing completely. Severe restrictions have been placed on the numbers of cod that may be caught in a season, the number of commercial fishermen has declined--just as it has on the West Coast--and there is some doubt the cod ever will return to the levels of yesteryear.

And swordfishermen, as anyone who has read The Perfect Storm knows, have had to go farther and farther into the North Atlantic to find catchable swordfish (as far as 400 miles) and set out enormously lengthy and expensive lines, gambling on the weather and the catch. While the payoff can be great, so is the danger.

Finally, there are those who think that catching fish is as much a matter of luck as it is of skill. (This, I may add, does not include my fisher friends, who think of themselves as skilled, if amateur, craftsmen when it comes to catching fish.) Of course, skilled or not, the fact is that this salmon season they were pretty well skunked, and last year was not much better.

It is this consistency which has caused them to pause and contemplate. They'd like to know why the salmon aren't biting; if they are ever going to bite again; and what they or anyone else can do about it. And that's certainly a fish story--and an important one, too.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident. A collection of his earlier essays can be found on the Internet at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached by email at feodorh@juno.com.

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