Salmon one of nature's endangered

It was a giant among salmon, three times the size of its peers — an 85-pounder that turned up in the upper Sacramento River, believed the largest in three decades.

But the reason for the fish's girth had a darker layer — a population crash that has led to severely restricting fishing on West Coast shores and rivers.

"It had its last year basically free because there was no commercial fishery," said Doug Killam, a state Department of Fish and Game researcher in Tehama County.

The giant salmon discovered in late October, 20 miles south of Red Bluff, was one of a much-thinned field in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, where record low counts of chinook salmon have shrunk the Mid-Valley's angling season and started to threaten the businesses and tourism linked to it.

"The preliminary results are that they're similar to last year's returns — which were dismal," said Scott Barrow, a senior Fish and Game biologist in Sacramento.

Fall salmon counts have plunged nearly 90 percent from their 2002 peak of about 800,000, leading to a federal cancellation this year of ocean fishing and a shortened, restricted season for California's anglers. Earlier, state regulators predicted as few as 54,000 salmon would migrate up the Delta this fall.

Fish and Game delayed the Sacramento River season's usual summer opening to November, and anglers can keep only one salmon a day through year's end.

State biologists are surveying the current salmon run by checking video footage around the river, doing riverbank surveys on foot and counting dead fish, said Killam. The Pacific Fishery Management Council, regulator of West Coast fisheries, will release the season's salmon count in late January.

Any improvement leans heavily on winter rainfall breaking a string of nearly two full years of below-average precipitation, which have helped drive down river levels and impede salmon's journeys from the ocean to the rivers to spawn. The need for rain is more acute with the Delta's water nourishing not only North State fisheries, but Southern California cities and farms where much of the water is delivered.

"The tributaries, the dams at Oroville and Shasta, they're so low now that if they're not replenished, the whole state's going to be in trouble. The whole state depends on that," he said.

With dams and water pumps killing or slowing many salmon, authorities have stepped up releases of young salmon smolts downriver in hopes of easing their journey to the Pacific. Fish and Game has set out about 20 million smolts in the Sacramento Delta and the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife has released another 12 million, according to Harry Morse, a Fish and Game spokesman.

But the releases are only of limited help to anglers and the businesses dependent on them, a longtime Mid-Valley tackle shop owner, Mike Searcy said.

Birds, mammals and striped bass often find the young fish to be easy pickings "like putting a 3-year-old in front of a tiger," he said.

Those young fish surviving the gauntlet need two or three years in the ocean to mature to catchable size, perhaps more time than already battered business owners have.

"Either you have to find another way to make money without salmon, or you're going to close," said Searcy, who runs Star Bait and Tackle in Linda, where business is down 30 percent from a year ago. "You're going to see a lot of stores close, small ones and even big ones with their huge overhead."

Some good news came out of Washington Tuesday, as the Bush administration released the remaining $70 million of the disaster relief that Congress appropriated to help salmon fishermen and related business after the West Coast fishery collapsed last summer. Congress appropriated $170 million, but last September the administration held back revenues to help cover costs of the fish census.

Congress rejected the plan.

The Associated Press contributed to this report