WINCHESTER BAY -- When Scott Howard was a boy, his dad ran charter boats out of Winchester Bay, tapping his only son first as a fish cleaner and, from age 15 on, as a deckhand all summer long.

 His mom ran the Salmon Harbor Cafe on the waterfront, steps from the docks and the metal tables where long lines of tourists and sport anglers waited to clean their haul.

 When he was older, Howard decided to run charter boats, too. Now he has three of them, worth $160,000 total. But this year, he has almost no salmon to catch.

 The closure of nearly all ocean salmon fishing this year is the biggest hit to Oregon's coastal sport fishing in at least 15 years. Salmon are largely off limits for charter operators such as Howard -- and for sport anglers who bring their boats to the coast by the thousands, pumping millions of dollars into local businesses, from motels to taverns to tackle shops.

 All told, the state projects $22 million in losses to businesses that support recreational fishing, mostly in coastal towns. And that's on top of $23 million in projected commercial fishing losses.

 Howard, 44, feels the effects. "I'm still getting some calls and traffic," he says. "But I'm way down. And the bills keep coming."

 Last year, the state estimates, salmon accounted for less than a quarter of the sport catch in Garibaldi, Newport and Brookings, the other big recreational salmon ports in the closure area. With salmon counts low, the main catch was reef-dwelling rockfish, also known as red snapper, along with halibut and albacore.

 The challenge for Winchester Bay, like Astoria and nearby Florence, is that its rocky reefs are mostly farther out in the ocean, beyond a 40-fathom line that is the cutoff for rockfish restrictions. Regulators began to limit the rockfish catch in the late 1990s because of concern about over-fishing and depleted stocks in deeper water. Last year, Newport's sport anglers landed about 8,500 salmon and nearly 70,000 rockfish. Winchester Bay's landed about 10,000 salmon, the state estimates -- and fewer than 100 rockfish. The rockfish number is probably an underestimate, Howard says, but it's a fair indication of the disparity. – The Oregonian

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