Juvenile salmon released at the Pillar Point Harbor

Commercial salmon season in the state will be closed for a third year in a row in 2025, largely due to grim forecasts of Chinook salmon stock.

The idea behind the volunteer release efforts is both to increase the general salmon population and encourage salmon to return to the harbor once they have matured, ostensibly creating a new fishery at Pillar Point, Mattusch said.

The commercial salmon fishing season will be closed entirely this year, and the recreational season is short — including one opening from June 7-8 with a 7,000 Chinook harvest limit across the state and an additional opportunity for waters between Point Reyes and Point Sur from Sept. 4-7. But the group views the releases as a long-term investment.

“It’s augmenting the population,” Mattusch said. “We do this every year, not only to augment the population but, on catchable years, supplying fish for recreational and commercial to catch.”

The 250,000 salmon juveniles currently acclimating to the cold seawater of Pillar Point Harbor were released into the harbor May 30. Two other batches of young salmon, known as smolt, will be delivered to the harbor and released in the coming month.

“They will spend three years at sea,” Mattusch said. “By the time they are 3 years old, they’ll be big old catchable fish that you’d love to have on the table.”

Over the years, the Coastside Fishing Club has released 14.5 million salmon. At first, 100% of those fish were tagged to monitor where they headed after release, Mattusch said, but the program has been so successful that now only 25% of fish require tagging.

Some fish do not return — one time, 40,000 fish from the release population were caught in West Port, Washington — but the efforts are still considered extremely successful.

“We release the fish and just hope they come back,” Mattusch said.

The fish were delivered by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife from the Mokelumne fish hatchery, where they are vaccinated against disease to give them a better chance of survival.

Despite the challenges faced by the California salmon fishing industry — including ongoing fights over water rights that help salmon populations grow to maturity — Mattusch hopes the release efforts will bolster the coastside fishing community.

“The whole thing was based on seeing these people fish and trying to bring a new fishery to Pillar Point Harbor that had never existed before,” he said.