SAN DIEGO — California authorities desire federal catastrophe help for the state’s salmon fishing market, they stated Friday following the closure of leisure and business king salmon fishing seasons along much of the West Coast due to near-record low numbers of the renowned fish returning to their generating premises.
Dealing a blow to the salmon fishing market, the Pacific Fishery Management Council all authorized the closure Thursday for fall-run chinook fishing from Cape Falcon in northern Oregon to the California-Mexico border. Limited leisure salmon fishing will be enabled off southern Oregon in the fall.
Much of the salmon captured off Oregon stem in California’s Klamath and Sacramento rivers. After hatching in freshwater, they invest an average of 3 years growing in the Pacific, where numerous are snagged by industrial anglers, priorto moving back to their generating premises, where conditions are more perfect to provide birth. After laying eggs, they passaway.
“The projections for chinook returning to California rivers this year are near record lows,” Council Chair Marc Gorelnik stated after the vote in a news release. “The bad conditions in the freshwater environment that contributed to these low anticipated returns are sadly not something that the Council can or has authority to control.”
Biologists state the chinook population has decreased significantly after years of dryspell. Many in the fishing market state a rollback of federal defenses for threatened salmon under the Trump administration enabled more water to be diverted from the Sacramento River Basin to farming, triggering even more damage.
“The truth is that simply too numerous salmon eggs and juvenile salmon passedaway in the rivers in 2020 as a direct outcome of p