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Steelhead
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Northern CA
Posts: 449
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Re: "WILD" designation at the markets?
The Article:
Fishermen frustrated in search for salmon
Foreign competition, rules affect profits
Eric Brazil, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, August 6, 2001
Bodega Bay -- Bludgeoned by competition from cheap, pen-raised Chilean fish
and barred from prime fishing grounds by the Endangered Species Act,
California's North Coast salmon fishermen are struggling.
"I'm almost making a living," said Dave Bitts of McKinleyville (Humboldt
County) as he unloaded 62 chinook salmon for $2 a pound at the Sonoma County
town of Bodega Bay.
Bitts, 53, is one of the few trollers -- who fish for salmon with hooks and
lines -- actively working the North Coast waters, where the fleet has
dwindled from 3,243 vessels to 725 in the fishery's downward spiral since
the early 1980s.
"The guys who have survived and are still in it are the tough ones," said
Zeke Grader, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's
Associations. Only about half of the salmon boats are actively working, he
said.
"At $2 a pound you can get hamburger cheaper," said Vivian Bolin of
Mendocino, who fished commercially from 1974 through 1994 and is now a
salmon restoration consultant.
Bitts and his fellow fishermen notice a grim symmetry in the drama now
unfolding in the upper Klamath Basin, with farmers clamoring for water
blaming the government for their plight.
Fishermen feel their issues have been neglected in comparison with farmers
in the Klamath Basin, whose outcry about a federal cutoff of irrigation
water prompted national attention, emergency water releases, $20 million in
federal relief and state-financed wells. The farmers' irrigation water had
been cut off to protect salmon and other endangered fish species.
"The farmers seem to have more political clout than we do," Bitts said.
When he began fishing commercially in 1975, "you could fish on the whole
coast, and you could keep coho (salmon) after June," Bitts recalled. "Now,
for all practical purposes, everything's just about closed between Bodega
Bay and Coos Bay (Ore.)."
The silver beauties caught by Bitts and others like him are headed for high-
end, white-tablecloth restaurants in the Bay Area.
Grader believes that's the niche North Coast fisherman are going to have to
aim for. Wild salmon don't gain weight as fast as salmon raised in pens, but
they taste better, and the industry has begun a marketing program to make
that point, he said.
"Our production here is sporadic, and the Chileans are dumping farmed
salmon -- we call it Pinochet salmon -- at very low prices," Grader said.
"The irony here is that supply and demand doesn't exactly work, and when our
production is low, people can't depend on it, so they go to other sources,
like Chile, and we lose our markets."
The growth of the farmed fish industry means that "traditional fish buyers
hold our fishermen to the price Chilean fishermen get," Grader said.
Despite the difficulties besetting salmon trollers, some other California
fishermen have it worse, said Dan Hunt, 42, of San Francisco, who recently
gave up dragging for ground fish -- cod, halibut, sole and the like -- and
bought a 36-foot troller.
Too many drag boats, too many regulations and too many protected fish
species made dragging uneconomical, Hunt said as he unloaded a catch of 72
chinook salmon in San Francisco.
The bad news keeps rolling in. Eureka Fisheries Inc. laid off 140 people
last month in Eureka (Humboldt County) and Crescent City (Del Norte County)
because it can't get enough fish to run its plants.
While the aggregate catch of chinook salmon has remained fairly steady since
1981 -- masked, to a considerable degree, by tens of thousands of
hatchery-raised fish -- the virtual closure of the Klamath River fishery has
devastated North Coast fishing ports.
Salmon landings at Fort Bragg, Eureka and Crescent City declined from 4.8
million pounds during 1976-80 to 58,000 pounds in 1998, according to a new
California Department of Fish and Game report.
"There were 300 working salmon boats home-ported in Fort Bragg," said Bolin.
"It was a very lively place."
The Klamath River system was once the third most productive salmon fishery
on the coast.
Spring-run chinook "have been extirpated" in the upper Klamath River by dam
construction, and only remnant populations survive in the Klamath's
principal tributaries, according to a new Department of Fish and Game
report.
"The water quality in the Klamath is pretty dismal," said Mitch Farro of
Trinidad, who gave up trolling in 1993 and now heads the Department of Fish
and Game's salmon and steelhead advisory committee.
Water quality deterioration, attributable in large part to upstream farming
and logging, has been particularly hard on the endangered coho salmon.
Humboldt County Supervisor Jimmy Smith said competition from pen-raised
salmon had been a big factor in the decline of the fishing industry, but
Klamath River Basin water quality and flows are of equal or greater
importance.
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