Reopening a fishery is not the same as restoring one. California's salmon fleet is finding that out in real time.
After federal managers voted in April to let commercial and recreational Chinook fishing resume - the commercial fleet had been shut down since 2023, recreational anglers nearly as long - the boats went back out. The businesses on shore that made a salmon season viable largely did not come back with them.
"We're losing marinas. We're losing tackle stores. We're losing bait shops. We're also losing infrastructure out on the ocean at the ports for gas pumps ... everything's going away because salmon is the driver," James Stone told Inside Climate News. Stone, 46, fishes out of Yuba City and chairs the board of the NorCal Guides and Sportsmen's Association, a group with 4,000 members representing more than 500 businesses.
Salmon, in his telling, subsidises everything else. Take it out and the spending does not simply move to another species. "People won't always spend the money for other species or for other recreational activities," Stone said. "Salmon is what drives the fishing industry."
The advice handed to crews during the closure was to diversify. Cameron Smith, a 70-year-old captain based in Benicia with over two decades of commercial fishing behind him, says the maths never worked. Boats chased Dungeness crab and cod, and fuel prices and inflation ate the difference.
"They can't pivot. There's nothing to pivot to," Smith said.
A normal season is worth roughly $1.4 billion in economic activity and 23,000 jobs in California, per the Golden State Salmon Association, plus about $700 million and more than 10,000 jobs in Oregon. NOAA announced $123.6 million in fishery disaster funding on June 17; $21.3 million of it went to Sacramento River and Klamath River fall Chinook ocean and inland fisheries, according to NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region spokesman Michael Milstein. A comparable sum, around $20 million, reached California fisheries in 2024.
The long arc of landings shows what has been lost. Pacific Fishery Management Council figures put California commercial trolling catches between 518,000 fish in the mid-1970s and more than 765,000 in the early 1980s. By 2019 the catch was 271,489, roughly half the bottom of that historical range, and the three preceding years came in between about 42,000 and 78,000 fish.
Even this season carries a trapdoor. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has warned it may reduce catch limits further or close scheduled fishing days outright if the summer harvest limit comes into range.
Drought, dams, water diversions and development have driven the freshwater side of the decline for decades. Nate Mantua, who heads the Landscape and Seascape Ecology Team at NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center, says the ocean has become an equal problem.
"The other piece of the climate puzzle is the Pacific Ocean has been warming. We had a period from 2014 to 2016 that is now referred to as the warm 'Blob' period, where ocean temperatures along California were at record highs," Mantua said. Ocean surface temperatures off central and southern California set fresh records earlier in 2026.
"This year we're in another very warm run of ocean temperatures off California, where our salmon spend most of their life," Mantua said. "So the warming ocean is putting the squeeze on the suitability of their ocean habitat at the same time that the warming terrestrial [and] watershed areas are putting the squeeze on their freshwater habitat."
Federal scientists now put the odds of a 'super' El Nino at 81 percent, and the comparisons being drawn are to 2015-16.
"I think we're likely to break global temperature records with this next El Nino," Malin Pinsky, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, told the Los Angeles Times. "So it's very concerning and it is likely to have very big impacts on marine fisheries." Marine species are shifting range five to 10 times faster than land species, he said.
What happened last time is the reason that matters. A Pseudo-nitzschia algal bloom loaded Dungeness crab with domoic acid, a seven-month season was compressed to roughly two, 71 percent of California's Dungeness boats stopped fishing and over 200 jobs disappeared. Market squid, then California's biggest commercial fishery by volume, relocated to Oregon and never fully returned.
University of Washington resource economist Sunny Jardine describes the underlying vulnerability: fleets plan their year around a small number of species with fixed openings, and a delay or closure unravels the schedule. Dungeness crab, typically the most lucrative catch of the year, is what she called a "gilded trap."
Back then, the best-capitalised boats simply ran north to find crab. At current fuel prices, that escape route is a lot narrower.
Stone and Smith want the same things: habitat work, a rethink of how state and federal agencies allocate water, and funding that arrives before a fishery closes rather than after. Governor Gavin Newsom's administration has pointed to salmon tagging, infrastructure removal and reintroduction efforts as evidence of progress, while its own strategy document concedes that runs once counted in the millions are now a fraction of that and depend heavily on hatcheries.
The fleet has its season back. It no longer has the coastline that used to support one.