California salmon fishing poised to finally reopen

It’s not the season the fleet had hoped for after years of closures. But those who survived the shutdowns fear a graver threat: state and federal decisions could reshape California’s water systems and rivers.

“Water policy in California is about to change drastically and irreversibly, and nobody has the energy to pay attention to that,” said Sarah Bates, who fishes commercially from San Francisco. “I am concerned that salmon is going to be (commercially) extinct in our lifetimes.”

For the first time since 2022, Bates was preparing her century-old boat, the Bounty, docked at Fisherman’s Wharf. She ticked off the boat’s needs: an oil change, a hydraulics check, a run-through of the steering system, the anchor. Her fading fishing permit, now four years out of date, still clings to the outside of the cabin.

“Pay no attention to my paint job,” Bates said. “Try not to make my boat look bad.”

Looking at its cracking paint and tangled ropes, Bates — who wrestles waves and weather for a living and uses a fishing float dented by a massive shark bite — seemed a little daunted by the tasks ahead.

Without income from salmon, Bates allowed critical upkeep to lag. “There’s been a lot of deferred maintenance,” she said. “I’m actually a little worried about everybody charging out into the ocean in May to go fishing.”

A tremendous, avoidable hit’

Salmon is king in California. It’s what keeps the markets and restaurants buying, the industrial-scale ice machines running, the tourists booking charter boats and visiting the coast.

“It’s iconic,” said retired charter boat captain John Atkinson. “We have people who will fish every week for salmon. And for the other species, they come out once.”

But dams, water diversions, low flows and poor ocean conditions have driven decades of decline.

California experienced its driest three year stretch in history from 2020 through 2022 — worsening that burden and causing populations to plummet. Interstate fisheries managers cancelled commercial salmon fishing for an unprecedented three years in a row, and barred recreational fishing for all but a handful of days last year.

The financial damage was severe. California estimated the closures cost nearly $100 million in lost coastal community and state personal income during the first two years alone.

The fishing industry says these numbers vastly underestimate the economic and human costs: Boats went to the crusher, tourists took their money to other states, suppliers went out of business and fishers fled California or the industry altogether.

“This was a tremendous, avoidable hit. We have survived droughts throughout recent history, but none had impacts this drastic,” Vance Staplin, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, said in an email.

California has requested disaster assistance from the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. But federal aid has come slowly, and fallen short. The U.S. government has released only $20.6 million, and only for the 2023 closure.

“The entire framework for fishery disasters has to be totally redone,” said U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “We need something that is much faster, that is less political, that doesn’t depend on all the vagaries of multiple federal agencies and congressional appropriations.”

Rain, but little respite

The rains returned in 2023 — bringing the flows and cool water young salmon need to survive and complete their ocean migration.

Now, the Pacific Fishery Management Council projects that roughly 392,000 Sacramento River fall-run Chinook salmon are swimming off the coast. These are the mainstay of California’s salmon fishery — and the forecasts are better than last year’s, though still a fraction of the millions that returned historically. But the limited fishing season is not the respite that the industry had counted on.

“We’re happy to get some fishing this year,” Staplin, of the Golden State Salmon Association, said, “but if we want to preserve the businesses and families that define California’s coastal and inland salmon economies, we need a little compromise and balance in prioritizing water during droughts.”

A plan or a patch?

Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom released a plan aimed at protecting salmon from climate change.

The plan received mixed reactions.

Some scientists and members of the fishing community credited state agencies and the Newsom administration with concrete efforts like hatchery upgrades and cutting-edge genetic fish tagging. One$58 million state and federal effort — the Big Notch Project — connected salmon and other fish to prime floodplain habitat in the Yolo Bypass through seasonal gates.

“Anything that can be done is a help right now,” Atkinson said.

But others say that the strategy papers over policies that rob salmon of the cold water they need. California is built around nature-defying engineering that funnels vast amounts of water away from rivers to supply cities and the state’s $60 billion agricultural economy.

“As soon as it stops raining or snowing, we’re going to be back in the same situation with the salmon season closing,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director at The San Francisco Baykeeper. “If we don’t protect river flows and cold water storage, then we’re not protecting salmon.”

Some of the fiercest fights are over the contentious Delta tunnel and Newsom’s controversial deal with major water users, backed by $1.5 billion in state funding, to overhaul how farms and cities take water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the rivers that feed it.

Carson Jeffres, a senior researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, takes a more moderate view — the effect on salmon will depend on how California agencies manage these projects, but the status quo isn’t an option.

“I just don’t see a world where the salmon are prioritized over human water needs — and I think we should plan for it,” he said. “Then that might be a more sustainable place.”

On top of state policies is a Trump administration that called for “Putting People over Fish” and adopted a plan in December to send more Northern California water to Central Valley farms.

State wildlife officials said at the time that Trump’s actions “run counter” to California’s efforts to improve salmon populations, “harming the California communities that rely on salmon for their livelihood.”

California Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot acknowledged the state’s finite water supply can’t satisfy everyone’s priorities.

“There’s no shortage of finger pointing by some groups who argue that not enough water is remaining in our rivers for salmon and aquatic habitat, and other groups that suggest that not enough water is being diverted for California communities and agriculture,” Crowfoot said.

“Water management in California,” he said, “involves balancing water across these needs.”

Last year, the Newsom administration announced that nearly 70% of the salmon strategy’s action items were underway, and more than a quarter were already complete.

That’s “crazy math ... What is your outcome measure?” said Bates. “For us, our outcome measure is enough fish to go fishing.”

Adapting to survive

In the absence of enough fish, the industry has been piloting new strategies to survive.

Back at Fisherman’s Wharf, a few rows over from Bates, Captain Virginia Salvador was getting ready to take a group out to troll for halibut and striped bass. Her French bulldog, Anchovy, wandered the deck between the ropes.

Salvador started her charter boat business, Unforgettable Fishing Adventures, during the salmon shutdown — and had to quickly expand her offerings.

Now, she runs barbecue and barhopping cruises around San Francisco Bay and takes passengers to McCovey Cove during Giants games. She teams up with food influencer Rosalie Bradford Pareja to offer a chef experience. And she still holds down a second job working in a hospital pathology laboratory.

“When you rely on a natural entity for your income, you have to learn how to deviate, pivot, expand,” Salvador said.

Where the front row of charter boats line the street like storefronts, Bates’ row at Fisherman’s Wharf has the feeling of a neighborhood. One fisherman clambered down the ladder to Bates’ boat, where they swapped great white shark stories. Bates hollered to another neighbor every time a tourist wandered down the dock, bucket in hand, looking to buy fresh crab.

This neighbor, a tattooed and lanky and exhausted fisherman named Shawn Chen Flading, had been out all night. His 12 hour mission to retrieve crab pots turned into a 26 hour ordeal when his throttle cable broke.

At the time Flading bought his boat, before the shutdowns, it looked like a pretty good living.

“A lot of people — the older generation — put their kids through college, bought their homes. And it just disappeared,” Flading said. “I lost basically half my revenue for the past three years straight.”

He tries to fill the gap by advertising on social media and selling Dungeness crab directly off his boat. But the crab season, too, he said, has been disappointing.

Now, salmon fishing is once again on the horizon.

“Whatever limited opportunity we have for salmon, at least we’re getting the ball rolling,” Flading said to Bates across the water between their boats, over the San Francisco mix of cars, construction and seagulls. “Without that, we’re just stuck.”

Bates, leaning on the railing of her own boat, agreed. “I really understand why people are upset,” she said. “But also, I’m so excited to catch some fish. Even though it’s not enough. It’s not even close to enough.”