California limits rockfish for sports guys

Federal, state, and local officials say the swift end to the 2008 salmon season requires an equally swift decision about providing disaster assistance. They want to avoid the lag time coastal communities faced between disaster declaration and assistance after the 2006 salmon fishery closure.

The pending 2008 closure -- one far more sweeping in scope than the 2006 shutdown -- prompted U.S. Rep. Darlene Hooley and Oregon's U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith to request immediate federal disaster assistance.

"The decisions made on the 2008 salmon fishery will be, quite literally, life altering for many, and historic for the coast," said Hooley. "The federal and state response must be swift and sure to provide disaster assistance to our coastal communities." Hooley wants the federal assistance included in the 2008 Emergency Disaster Supplemental Appropriations Bill expected to go to Congress in late April or early May. – Newport News-Times

TRACY, Calif. -- When water managers in the center of California throw the switch to send water south toward thirsty Los Angeles and farms and cities along the way, rivers start to run backward.

 Roaring pumps gulp from the once-vibrant maze of waterways in the heart of the state known as the California Delta. Today it's the center of a gargantuan plumbing system stretching from one end of California to the other.

 It's also the cradle for fish that Oregon depends on.

 They are Sacramento River fall Chinook salmon, and this is what the young fish negotiate as they swim to the ocean. If they make it beyond the pumps to the ocean, and thrive there, they fill the holds of Oregon fishing boats, supply grocery store fish cases and thrill sport anglers who pile onto Oregon charter vessels every summer.

 More than half the salmon caught off the Oregon coast typically come from the Sacramento.

 But these salmon, which have long defied their surroundings to remain the strongest salmon stock on the West Coast, have suddenly collapsed. Fish headed to sea vanished amid a treacherous world of large water diversions, reversing rivers, alien predators, toxic water and, in the ocean, unpredictable currents and food supplies.

 The most sweeping salmon fishing closure in history will keep most West Coast salmon boats in port this summer in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the few fish left in the ocean. Meanwhile, scientists, fishermen and millions of others from Southern California to Oregon whose fate is tied to these fish unravel the mystery of what killed off the rest of them.

 "It isn't just a California problem," says Ken Scheidegger, an oceanographer by training who left a professor's job at Oregon State University to run a marina in the California Delta. "We're all looking at it, because we're all involved in it."

 Though many scientists see ocean conditions as the only factor big enough to explain the severity of the collapse, others also finger California's insatiable thirst for water.

 The Sacramento River resembles the Columbia River in the obstacles it holds for salmon -- dams, for instance, and pollution. But the Sacramento and its delta, where the river slows and wanders before reaching San Francisco Bay, has the added pressure of supplying water to 23 million people in the most populous state in the nation and one of the driest.

 Silicon Valley and Hollywood get their water from this river. So do farms that grow much of the nation's lettuce, garlic, tomatoes and other crops.

 That makes it all the more amazing that Sacramento River salmon have survived here so well for so long.

 Until now.

 Sacramento salmon were long ago cut off from their richest habitat by dams designed in the 1930s. The dams capture rain and snow in relatively wet Northern California and deliver it to the desert hundreds of miles south.

 The dams, including Shasta Dam, remain one of the most ambitious water projects in the world. The complex includes an 11-mile tunnel shunting water from the Trinity River, a part of the Klamath River drainage that stretches into Oregon, through the snowy Trinity Mountains into the Sacramento and, ultimately, south to Southern California.

 The system uses the Sacramento River as a canal. The water flows according to human demands, which means it may not come at the right time or temperature for fish. Nests of salmon eggs, called redds, may end up high, dry and dead.

 Biologists carefully mete out the limited supply of cool water in reservoirs they can release into rivers to keep them hospitable to salmon.

 For decades, the system's out-of-whack flows and diversion dams killed lots and lots of fish, recalls James Smith, a fisheries biologist who has worked since the 1980s for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Red Bluff, Calif., along the upper Sacramento.

 The Sacramento is unique in having four separate runs of salmon: spring, fall, late fall and winter -- each finely tuned to its own seasons and conditions. The salmon persevered after the dams, with the winter fish shifting their spawning to new stretches they could still reach.

 "It was pretty miraculous they were able to survive," Smith says.

 The Sacramento's winter salmon were declared endangered in 1994, but the river and fish have persisted. The river defied government attempts to straighten and confine it.

 The fall salmon -- long the strongest run and heavily supplemented by fish hatcheries -- even boomed as recently as a few years ago.

 It's not unusual for fishermen to pull 45- or 50-pound salmon from the upper river every year.

 But this year, Smith says, the number of young salmon heading downriver is down, way down, evidence that few wild adults returned to spawn last year.

 Still, Smith cannot see an explanation in the river for the salmon collapse. For one thing, it's much friendlier to salmon today. New screens keep them from getting sucked into irrigation ditches, and a diversion dam at Red Bluff -- made of panels that open and shut -- remains open much of the year so fish can get by. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spent $80 million retrofitting Shasta Dam to release cooler water when fish most need it.

For another thing, when the fish that have vanished first headed to sea, river flows were unusually good.

 "Lots of good things were happening," Smith says. "Then all of a sudden, where did all our fish go?"

 Salmon swimming south in the Sacramento River toward the ocean soon enter a strange and manhandled place called the California Delta.

 Once this was a vast, prolific wetland where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers slowed and wandered through a lazy spider-web of channels and finally into San Francisco Bay and the ocean.

 But state and federal water managers set about moving the water to better suit California's needs. They diverted the headwaters of the San Joaquin River, which once held the southernmost salmon run in the United States. Parts of it are now dry most years.

 They reworked the delta to get water from the Sacramento River at the north end to giant pumping plants at the south end. The pumps then ship it farther south to cities and farms.

 Water on its way to the ocean is pulled backward by the pumps, reversing river flows and drawing saltwater inland. The system is delicately balanced: Managers can open huge metal gates to feed extra freshwater into the central delta, helping flush the intruding saltwater back out.

 "They're literally operating the rivers to support the pumps," said Tina Swanson, a scientist with the Bay Institute, an advocate for better fish protection.

 Cities hundreds of miles away in Southern California can tell when the gates are closed because without the flushing freshwater, water they get from the delta is saltier and requires more costly filtering.

 Caught in the middle of all this are the fish.

 The reversing rivers throw them off course on their way to the sea, sucking them into the sluggish maze of the delta. There they face voracious predators such as bass, an introduced species, and pollution from the booming population around the delta.

 "There are forces at work to confuse and alter what they would normally do," said Scheidegger, the former OSU professor.

 The pumps to Southern California sit like a drain at the south end of the delta, their intakes near sea level.

 Water headed for the pumps flows first through screens at state and federal "fish salvage facilities." The screens strain out fish, which end up in metal buckets at the bottom of funnel-shaped chambers.

 Jeff McCracken of the federal Bureau of Reclamation calls them "billion-dollar buckets" because if too many protected fish such as smelt and salmon end up in them, pumps may be shut down -- with billion-dollar repercussions in Southern California. Fish in the buckets are loaded into tanker trucks and released closer to the ocean.

 But biologists know that many die before they reach the buckets. Some studies have found three quarters or more get eaten by bass. About 55,000 salmon are believed to have been killed in the system in early 2006, when the missing salmon were on their way to the sea, according to the California Department of Water Resources.

 "Practically the best thing a salmon can do is get through the delta as fast as it can, because it's so dangerous," Swanson says.

 Conditions have deteriorated to where a judge last year restricted pumping to Southern California to help protect another collapsing species, the federally protected delta smelt. A similar decision on salmon may come soon. Only a few pumps are running now.

 Not only salmon and smelt are collapsing. So are other fish species, even the bass. Exotic weeds, including an aquatic grass used to decorate aquariums, are taking over the delta. Careless water skiers plow into big mats of water hyacinth.

 Scheidegger recalls when fishermen would show up at 4 a.m. to rent boats, catch their limit of hulking, healthy fish, and hand off their boat to a second set of anglers who did the same.

 "This system used to be so friendly to fishermen," he recalls. "There may be as many fishermen, but I don't think they're catching what they used to in terms of keepers."

 He watches the delta with a scientist's eye, looking for changes in the place he has lived for 25 years. He started a nonprofit to highlight the delta and its resources -- which many Californians barely realize exist.

 "If you want to blame something, it's the increasing population of California -- you're putting more pressure on water and everything else," he says. "How are you going to improve the system if you're taking away the water that made it what it was to begin with?"

 State fish hatcheries truck their salmon past the delta so more survive to reach the sea.

But that may provide another clue about what did in the fish. Trucked fish have suffered much the same collapse as fish that traveled down the river and past the delta. That suggests to Smith and other scientists that while plenty of fish perish in the delta, something else, something even bigger, may be dominating this die-off.

 When salmon swim into the ocean, they disappear for years. That's why fisheries biologists often call it a "black box." There's little hint of what happens to them until they head back to their home river to spawn.

 Last year, few did.

 Salmon, unlike most other fish, depend on two very different environments: the river (and in the Sacramento, the delta) and the sea. It pays off when the fish can escape poor river conditions in the ocean.

 But when the ocean takes a turn for the worse, they get a double whammy. And that's exactly what the ocean from San Francisco north to Oregon did, just as the missing fish ventured into it.

 Seabirds washed up dead on the beach as a pipeline of nutrients from the deep ocean shut down. Young salmon -- especially fall Chinook, no longer than your index finger when they enter the sea -- perished too.

 "These animals are unique in that they need two very healthy habitats," says Bruce MacFarlane, leader of the salmon ecology team at the federal Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, Calif. "What we can do is, we can take care of the freshwater side a lot better than we can take care of the marine side."

 There's no question that the Sacramento delta is in trouble. But many scientists see no evidence that it was dramatically worse when the vanished salmon passed through than in other years when salmon thrived.

 The diversion gates that often shunt them off course were closed most of the time. Pumping has increased in recent years, but remains limited when many of the fall salmon pass through.

 Coastal salmon runs from other river systems declined, too. There's little doubt the deteriorating delta leaves the young salmon more vulnerable to an unfriendly sea. But the combination may have dealt them a devastating blow.

 "When conditions in one place or the other are bad, they may be able to suffer through it," Swanson said. "When conditions in both places are poor, it's when you see these dramatic drops." – The Oregonian

VANCOUVER — The B.C. Supreme Court has ruled that a native band on the province's north coast has no right to a separate commercial fishery.

 The Tsimshian First Nation had sought a declaration from the court that it has an aboriginal right to fish on a commercial scale for a wide variety of seafood, including salmon, halibut and herring.

 The federal and provincial governments disputed the band's claim, arguing that before the arrival of Europeans, the Coast Tsimshian harvested a variety of species for sustenance, but traded only small amounts of fish, other than oolichan.

 Madam Justice Deborah Satanove agreed with the Crown on that point, and ruled the trade in oolichan could not be expanded to a right to trade commercially for other species.

She also found the Crown had never given the First Nation a promise of commercial fishing rights or promised an exemption from limits placed on other fishing groups. – Canadian Press

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 

Rising fuel costs are causing headaches for Oregon's commercial shrimpers and shrimp processors.

As of April 1, when this year's pink shrimp season opened, all but a handful of Oregon's shrimpers have tied up their boats to protest what fishermen say are inadequate prices given the skyrocketing cost of fuel. In a good year, about two dozen fishermen deliver pink shrimp to processors at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Shrimp processors say they are offering fishermen a reasonable price -- and the highest price they can afford in the current shrimp market.

But without the promise of higher prices for their catch, fishermen say, it's not worth paying the price of fuel to go fishing.

"The prices that are out there just aren't good enough to actually make a profit," said Astoria shrimper Brian Petersen, who usually delivers his catch to Fishhawk Fisheries for processing. "We don't know what we're going to do. The season started April 1, and the last time I checked fuel was up $3.60 a gallon. It's tough to do that on what they're offering."

Fuel prices have spiked since last season, Petersen said, but the price for shrimp has not risen to help cover the expense. Market conditions appear to be strong for the Oregon shrimp product, he said, but the price isn't reflecting those conditions.

Steve Fick, owner of Fishhawk Fisheries, said actually, processors are facing a difficult market for selling Oregon's shrimp. They're competing with an abundance of less expensive foreign shrimp products, he said, which makes it harder to sell local shrimp at the price fishermen are requesting.

"What they're asking for right now is more cost than the processors can sell it for," said Fick, noting that the downturn in the U.S. economy isn't helping the cause, either.

"Fuel prices are frustrating for everyone," he said. "Everybody's having a tough time, and they're not going to spend a lot of money on shrimp."

According to Jeff Boardman, a Newport shrimper and a member of the Oregon's shrimp marketing association, said about 95 percent of the state's shrimp fleet is tied up and waiting for a better offer from processors.

A few boats have gone out to fish for some processors. Bornstein Seafoods has offered a fuel bonus of a few cents per pound to help with rising costs, and two of its six boats are fishing.

Last year, the Oregon shrimp fleet was the first shrimp fishery in the world to be awarded Marine Stewardship Council certification for its efforts to produce environmentally sustainable product. Often, the eco-label helps garner higher prices for Oregon shrimp among environmentally conscious consumers.

The group has asked the Oregon Department of Agriculture to step in to help negotiate a price.

"It's pretty tough on some of us," he said. "All I do is shrimp, and we're losing some of our season. ... The sad part about this is we worked so hard to get the (Marine Stewardship Council) label, and we really need to get out there and put our product on the market to see if we can get more money for it." – Pacific Fishing columnist Cassandra Marie Profita writing in The Daily Astorian

GENEVA— Illegal fishing of cod and pollock in the Arctic is a transnational crime that is putting the health of fisheries at risk, a report published Wednesday by conservation group WWF shows.

 The illegal activity is also adding pressure on fish stocks that are already feeling the impact of climate change, said the report.

 Some 70 percent of the world's white fish supply originates from the Arctic. Among these are the Russian-Alaska pollock and Barents Sea cod which account for about a quarter of the world's white fish supply.

 In 2005, over 100,000 tonnes of illegal cod valued at 225 million euros (350 million dollars) were caught in the Barents Sea.

 Efforts to clamp down have resulted in the halving of such illegal landings of cod, but the poaching of Alaska pollock remains a problem, said the WWF.

 Illegal Alaska pollock catch can reach a value of 45 million euros a year.

 "Illegal fishing in the Arctic is a serious transnational crime crossing European, African, Asian and American borders," said Neil Hamilton, director of WWF International's Arctic Programme.

 "Cheats are putting short-term profits ahead of the long-term survival of Arctic fisheries," he added.

 The group said illegally caught pollock was typically carried to China for processing by a Russian vessel, the deal was usually handled by middlemen in South Korea, and the processed fish re-exported as fillets to the United States.

 "With markets spread across the globe, the distribution of black market cod and pollock is a global problem," said the group. – Press release