On California’s coast, farewell to the king salmon; For the first time there’s no fishing for chinook salmon on the California coast

From the Smithsonian Magazine:

The salmon-boat cemetery in Fort Bragg, a fishing port tucked into shaggy pines about 150 miles north of San Francisco, is full of bleached and peeling hulls. Over the years many California vessels have landed in Bruce Abernathy’s front yard, pitched at steep angles among the weeds, some still rigged with trolling poles. The Anita II, the Dag. Eventually Abernathy’s son David takes them apart with a tractor and chain saw and sells what he can for parts. Sometimes all that’s left is a scrap with a painted-on name: My Pet.

Bruce Abernathy himself doesn’t watch the demolitions. He finds somewhere else to be, or he stays inside his house, with its many framed prints of trim little ships atop frisky seas. The fisherman turned resale man, and lately junk dealer, has “a lot of remorse” about what’s happening outside his window beyond the hot pink rhododendron bush. “I know almost everybody who owned these boats,” he said. “Boats become part of you, like a wife.”

Thirty years ago there were several thousand salmon boats in California. More recently, as the fish became scarce, only a few hundred worked the coast. Then salmon populations crashed, and this year for the first time U.S. officials canceled all ocean salmon fishing off California and most of Oregon, and curtailed it off Washington, a $300 million loss. When I visited Fort Bragg, in late May, the harbor felt about as cheerful as a junkyard. The docks should have quaked with activity, but the mooring basin was quiet except for the hoarse bark of sea lions. The fishermen with the biggest boats hoped to go way out after tuna later in the season; others had already joined roadwork crews or cobbled together odd jobs. Disaster relief money would be on the way, but to many second- and third-generation fishermen, a summer without salmon felt like the end of the line. For the better part of a century the fish supported Fort Bragg, home of the World’s Largest Salmon Barbeque, at which local politicians flip fillets on the grill and tourists come from far and wide to taste one of the most sought-after fish in the sea, the chinook salmon, a.k.a. the king.

Read more from the Smithsonian Magazine by clicking here.

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