Decision on salmon river fishing delayed

While salmon fishing boats will sit idle on the California coast this year, the fate of angling season remains undecided.

The state Fish and Game Commission this morning voted to cancel recreational ocean fishing for chinook, known as king salmon. But commissioners delayed until May 9 a decision on whether to shut down angling in the Sacramento and Feather rivers, where chinook season is to begin July 16 in the Mid-Valley.

Today's vote followed last week's decision by the Pacific Fishery Management Council to close the commercial salmon fishery in nearly all of coastal California and Oregon. Chinook stocks in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a prime nursery for the fish before they head to the Pacific Ocean, crashed from nearly 800,000 in 2002 to about 59,000 last fall.

Fish and Game Department officials had said the fishery council's vote made a full salmon closure very likely. But the delay in ruling on river angling gave a small glint a hope to Bob Boucke, a Yuba City tackle-shop owner who attended the commission meeting in Sacramento.

"I said it was going to be devastating to our area as well as ocean people," said Boucke, who runs Johnson's Bait & Tackle. "We would suffer substantially. Not only have we lost salmon, but the (Oroville Dam) reservoir's so low we're not going to have any trout fishing either. By July there wont be a way to launch a boat."

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