SALMON SEASON BARELY SURVIVES:TO PROTECT KLAMATH CHINOOK, SEVERE LIMITS PROPOSED

A key advisory panel recommended the most severe limits on commercial and

sport salmon fishing in state history Thursday, but stopped short of canceling

the entire season.

The restrictions, aimed at protecting the dwindling number of chinook that

spawn in the Klamath River, are expected to dramatically reduce local

harvests, increase demand for wild and farmed salmon and drive up retail and

restaurant prices.

''We're going to lose some markets that we worked so hard to get,'' said

Fort Bragg fisherman Dan Platt, president of the Salmon Trollers Marketing

Association. ''It's probably restrictive enough that some guys are going to

end up losing their boats.''

Lobbied heavily by lawmakers, anglers, seafood processors and businesses

that rely on them, fishery managers meeting in Sacramento this week have

struggled to meet conservation goals while allowing some fishing off the

Oregon and Northern California coasts.

The options in front of them included a first-ever cancellation of salmon

season for commercial and sport fishermen.

''We found that balance,'' John Coon, deputy director of the Pacific

Fishery Management Council, said Thursday.

Off Fort Bragg, commercial fishing will be delayed until Sept. 1, and

commercial harvests off Bodega Bay will wait until July 26, Coon said.

In a healthy year for Klamath River chinook, the season would run from May

through September or October.

Following five years of drought along the Klamath and a third straight year

of spawning shortfalls, ''it's the largest closure of ocean salmon fishing off

the coast of Oregon and California ever,'' said Bob Lohn, the northwest

fisheries administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration.

Federal authorities must approve the council's recommendations, which

affect 700 miles of coastline, by May 1. Lohn said he expects they'll support

the compromise.

To Bodega fisherman Tom Graham, Thursday's decision compounded the

hardships he faced from last summer's shortened season.

''May, June and July are the heart of the season,'' said Graham, skipper of

the Bonnie, a commercial boat he bought a decade ago. ''We're being strangled

out of business on an ocean that belongs to everybody.''

At his wife's Bodega coffee shop, the ''Bonnie Bagel'' -- featuring smoked

salmon, which fetches a premium $30 a pound -- will be harder to come by,

Graham expects.

Chefs also are making contingency plans for locally caught salmon, a staple

on North Coast menus.

''The backbone for a restaurant is salmon on your menu,'' said chef Liz

Ozanich of Seafood Brasserie in Santa Rosa, noting how selective customers can

be about farm-raised versus wild. ''For us, it's going to mean higher prices,

and obviously you're going to have to somehow pass that higher price on or

take a hit.''

Though salmon from the Sacramento River are abundant in the ocean, boats

cannot distinguish between those that spawned in the Klamath and other rivers.

For every 100 salmon caught, only one is from the Klamath, Lohn said.

''They don't bear stickers from their home river,'' said Lohn, noting that

post-harvest genetic testing will help confirm biologists' estimates about the

salmon's origins. ''But we wish they did.''

Fishermen still are reeling from a massive fish kill on the Klamath in

2002, and have blamed the government's management of the river for their

plight.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger struck a sympathetic chord with them Wednesday,

when he cited ocean conditions, poor Klamath water quality, habitat loss and

parasites in a letter to the Department of Commerce about the curtailment of

salmon season.