HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — Aboard his weatherworn fishing boat, Duncan MacLean has pulled a livelihood from the high seas. He takes pride in putting seafood on dinner tables. He loves his workday on the roller-coaster swells.
But that storied way of life is at risk for West Coast fishermen. The culprit is a sick river and its dwindling salmon runs.
Environmental woes on the Klamath River, once among the nation's mightiest chinook spawning grounds, have prompted federal regulators to move toward an outright ban on salmon fishing this year along 700 miles of Pacific coast.
In ports from Monterey to Astoria, Ore., the grim prospect of losing the industry's most prized commercial catch -- the filet mignon of fish -- has denizens of the docks predicting economic ruin.
Grizzled fishermen talk of bankruptcy, of losing the only job they have ever known. Worries ripple from the docks to bayside pubs, bait-and-tackle shops, sportfishing charter businesses, motels that fill each summer with recreational fishermen, even grocery stores that boom during salmon season.
Believing they are being unfairly targeted for a problem they didn't cause, fishermen are vowing to jam hearings Monday and Tuesday in California and the Pacific Northwest on the possible ban. The Pacific Fishery Management Council, an advisory body, will make a final recommendation to federal regulators April 7 in Sacramento.
By some estimates, a canceled salmon season could domino into a $150-million hit on local economies that still depend on fishing as a financial cornerstone.
A salmon ban would also turn away countless sport fishermen drawn by the prospect of hooking a chinook. Recreational saltwater fishing contributes $1.7 billion to the California economy, and a year without salmon could cost plenty.
Economists say it is hard to predict how a salmon ban would affect prices on the West Coast, but they don't expect them to rise much more than a dollar per pound for commercial catch.
"The ripple effects, how far can you say they'll go?" wondered MacLean, a small, wiry man with work-roughened hands as big as paddles. "Right now, the whole infrastructure for this industry is fragile. This could turn it belly-up."
Commercial fishing's travails are the flip side to the disaster suffered by farmers who depend on the Klamath, which flows from Oregon's Cascade snowmelt to the coast north of Eureka, Calif.
