EUREKA, CALIF. -- — Instead of preparing to hit the Pacific's wind-tossed waters next month, veteran fisherman Dave Bitts sat at the counter of a dockside restaurant on Humboldt Bay recently, mulling fate and a cloudy future.
For the first time since the birth of the West Coast fishing industry 150 years ago, Bitts and other fishermen face a season without salmon.
Federal regulators, worried about sagging runs up and down the coast, agreed Thursday to cancel this year's commercial and recreational catch of chinook -- the prized king salmon of the fish market -- off California and Oregon.
The ban adopted by the Pacific Fishery Management Council after a weeklong meeting in Seattle marks the new low point for a trade enshrined in the West since the Gold Rush.
An aborted season will wallop coastal communities in which salmon has long been a financial and cultural mainstay. Repercussions are expected to ripple out, with the ban hurting not just fuel docks and tackle stores but also supermarkets and truck dealerships.
In California, commercial salmon fishing is a $150-million business.
Hardest hit will be full-time fishermen like Bitts, a gray-bearded Stanford graduate who three decades ago chucked plans to follow his family into teaching. He preferred the sea.
Like most North Coast fishermen, a hearty but shrinking brotherhood scattered in harbor towns like Fort Bragg, Bodega Bay and Santa Cruz, Bitts depends on the salmon catch for more than half his income.
After the last two dismal salmon seasons, he and other commercial fishermen knew 2008 would be bad.
The Sacramento River has in recent years been the West Coast's spawning powerhouse. While other rivers suffered, it became the backbone of the industry, with a productive run that reliably dispatched enough fish into the Pacific to keep the commercial fleet afloat and sport fishermen happy.
But lately the number of chinook returning to the river has been dropping. Scientists now predict that fewer than half the fish needed to ensure a sustainable population will return this fall.
Given these bleak realities, Bitts and many other fishermen are greeting the ban as a grim necessity for a livelihood that depends on the fickle nexus of Mother Nature and mankind.
"Going fishing this year would be like a farmer eating his seed corn," Bitts said. "For a sliver of a season and a tiny catch, it's not worth it."
