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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=nec@northcoast.com href="mailto:nec@northcoast.com">Tim McKay</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=nec@northcoast.com
href="mailto:nec@northcoast.com">nec@northcoast.com</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Tuesday, June 28, 2005 2:41 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Klamath NYT Story</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><B>Reduced Salmon Season Is Felt at Wharf and Table<BR></B></DIV>
<DIV>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/national/28fish.html<BR><BR><?/bigger><?/bigger><?/bigger><STRONG>By
<U><?color><?param 0000,0000,6666>DEAN E. MURPHY<?/color></U> <BR><?/bigger><?/bigger><?/fontfamily></STRONG><?bigger><?fontfamily><?param Arial>Published:
June 28, 2005<BR><BR><?/fontfamily><?fontfamily><?param Times_New_Roman><?bigger><?bigger>SAN
FRANCISCO, June 26 - The Pavo Grande was built in 1947 and has the sea-worn look
of a boat admired for its utility, not its polish. Even so, the salmon troller
has been getting some fresh paint and overdue carpentry repairs; before too
long, a new stove top will be coming.<BR><BR><?/bigger><?/bigger>Peter DaSilva
for The New York Times<BR><?bigger>Restrictions on the Klamath River have left
Barbara Emley and Larry Collins with little to do but fix up their salmon boat,
the Pavo Grande, in San Francisco. "God's feedlot is out there, and we can't go
near it," he said. <BR><BR><BR><?/bigger>Peter DaSilva for The New York
Times<BR><?bigger>A sign on the Pavo Grande protests the management of the
Klamath. <BR><BR><?bigger>It is not that Larry Collins and Barbara Emley, the
boat's husband-and-wife owners, have money to burn. What they have is
time.<BR><BR>"God's feedlot is out there, and we can't go near it," said Mr.
Collins, nodding toward the ocean from their slip at Fisherman's Wharf. "It's
death by a thousand cuts."<BR><BR>The couple are among the hundreds of
commercial fishermen in California and Oregon who have been forced to sit out
much of the salmon season because of chronic problems with the fish on the
Klamath River, one of the country's most politicized and litigated waterways,
about 270 miles north of here.<BR><BR>Allen Grover, a fisheries biologist with
the California Department of Fish and Game, said large springtime kills of
juvenile fish on the river in 2001 and 2002 have resulted in a paltry number of
adult king salmon returning from the Pacific to spawn in the river. The poor
showing has so worried fish and game officials that the salmon season has been
sharply curtailed to ensure enough fish survive to lay eggs and sustain the
Klamath's population.<BR><BR>"Everybody loses when you have low abundance," said
Mr. Grover, an adviser to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees
fishing off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington and imposed the
restrictions. <BR><BR>The Klamath, once one of the mightiest salmon rivers in
the West, in recent years has become a constant point of friction among farmers,
fishermen, environmentalists and Indian tribes over where its water should go.
The disputes have ensnared officials from both the Bush and Clinton
administrations.<BR><BR>Though the new restrictions came about after public
hearings and with cooperation from fishing groups, they have nonetheless put the
Klamath back in the political hot seat. <BR><BR>Indian tribes along the river
are unhappy because their harvest has been cut. Commercial fishing operations
say they are losing as much as $100 million. Consumers are alarmed at the loss
of one of the summer's most popular entrees. And seafood wholesalers say
restaurants and stores are paying record prices for the small amount on the
market, comparing the absence of the local fish to Maine going without
lobsters.<BR><BR>"For many of our customers, it's like a bear going into
hibernation, and they have to have that fish," said Ted Iijima, the manager of
the fish department at the Berkeley Bowl, a market in Berkeley where there has
been no local salmon for three weeks. "They'll try sea bass or rock cod, but
they come back and say, 'I've got to have my salmon!' "<BR><BR>Andy Brown, a
buyer at Hapuku Fish Shop in the Rockridge Market Hall in Oakland, was wrapping
trays of fresh salmon on Friday that had just arrived from Oregon. So-called
bubbles of trolling are allowed on certain days in certain places, and when the
bubble catch hits the market, it is treated like gold.<BR><BR>Mr. Brown was
selling the Oregon salmon for $20 a pound; farm salmon typically sells for half
that amount. He said his customers ask about the high prices, but do not
hesitate to pay them. <BR><BR>"Even if you are able to sell it at $80 a pound,
our suppliers said they can't supply it," Mr. Brown said. "So it doesn't matter
if it is flying off the shelf; we can't get it on the shelf."<BR><BR>The Pacific
Fishery Management Council has imposed a variety of restrictions, but the one
stinging the most involves the coast between Point Sur in central California and
Cape Falcon in northern Oregon, where the Klamath fish tend to concentrate. The
commercial fishing season there has been called off from June 1 through July 3,
traditionally one of the peak periods for king salmon, known locally as
chinook.<BR><BR>"We go through a complex, intricate process of closures and
openings that gives you the best fisheries with the least impacts," said John C.
Coon, deputy director of the council, which is based in Portland.<BR><BR>Though
the Pacific Ocean is chock-full of king salmon from healthier rivers like the
Sacramento, all salmon fishing is off limits because it is impossible to troll
selectively and avoid snagging the fish that instinctively return to the
Klamath. <BR><BR>"They're all intermixing," said Glen H. Spain, the northwest
regional director in Eugene, Ore., for the Pacific Coast Federation of
Fishermen's Associations. "So now most of the coast is closed down as those fish
pass through."<BR><BR>In a letter last month to Commerce Secretary Carlos M.
Gutierrez, Representative Mike Thompson of California, a Democrat in the Klamath
area, requested federal disaster assistance for the fishermen, suggesting the
hardship was on par with the fishing losses after El Niņo of 1982 and 1983.
<BR><BR>The problems on the Klamath have once again become a favorite topic of
conversation among fishermen stranded at the docks. Mr. Collins and Ms. Emley
have hoisted a hand-painted placard high above the Pavo Grande for tourists at
Fisherman's Wharf to feel their pain. <BR><BR>It says, "Mismanaged Klamath Water
Means I Don't Work." The couple have also distributed a two-page flier - "Key
facts behind this year's trolling restrictions" - to people strolling along the
docks.<BR><BR>"Hopefully, they'll read it and realize how screwed up everything
is and write their congressmen," Mr. Collins said.<BR><BR>Not only did tens of
thousands of juvenile salmon die upstream in the Klamath in the spring of 2001
and 2002, but at least 32,000 adult fish - even as many as 80,000, according to
some projections - were also killed near its mouth in the fall of 2002, the
largest salmon die-off recorded in California. <BR><BR>An analysis by the
California Department of Fish and Game found that the primary cause for the
kills was disease, which was facilitated by crowding and warm water temperatures
from low water flows. <BR><BR>The region has been plagued by drought for many
years, but fishermen, the Indian tribes and environmentalists have blamed a
decision by the Bush administration to allow much of the water to be diverted to
farmers for irrigation. The decision reversed a policy by the Clinton
administration to leave more water in the river for the fish, but Bush
administration officials have rejected claims that the farm water was
responsible for the die-off. <BR><BR>"We've got a situation here where we feel
we are sacrificing to return more fish to a river that is going to kill them,"
Ms. Emley said.<BR><BR>Though this year's restrictions were more severe than
those in recent years, Mr. Grover, the state fisheries biologist, said the
prospect for next year was also bleak because water flows on the Klamath have
largely remained unimproved. <BR><BR>Disagreement remains over where the blame
lies, but Mr. Grover said there was no dispute that salmon from rivers in
California's Central Valley, like the Sacramento, were generally getting
healthier, while those from the Klamath were not. As scientists worry about
meeting a target of 35,000 salmon returning to the Klamath this fall, he said,
about 1.7 million are projected to return to the Sacramento and its
tributaries.<BR>##### <?/bigger><?/bigger><?/fontfamily><?/bigger></DIV>
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<P></P><BR>Tim McKay, executive director, (707) 822-6918 (w), 677-3172
(h)<BR>Northcoast Environmental Center<BR>575 H Street<BR>Arcata CA
95521<BR>www.yournec.org</BODY></HTML>