Flasher vs Dodger

[Sea Wolf]

Bearbait-

I believe there's a little difference between the abundance of salmon for harvesting between your locales in Alaska and here in the rivers in California!

When I was 13, some 50 years ago, a 75 year old gentleman friend of my dad's related how they harvested the salmon protein (in Dan's terminology) back before the turn of the century (1900) in the Sacramento River in Redding. You drove a wagon with a team of horses into the shallows of the river, stopped, got out your pitchfork and loaded 'er up! Not exactly a sportsman's approach by our standards, but food was food. That was 150 years ago.

Today, fishermen pay $150 to go out in a guide's $50,000 jet river boat for a few hours for the chance to hook up and catch one or, rarely, two fish. They fish right in front of the inlet to the fish hatchery where the salmon return to be spawned artificially. Pretty sad.

Enjoy 'em while you still got 'em. Human population pressures have their impact on Mother Nature's wonderous world.

[Bearbait]

Dan, With a handline you'll have a limit as fast as you can drop the fish in the bucket once you find a school.
Sea Wolf, Most of the salmon in Prince William Sound are hatchery fish, Prince William Sound doesn't have any major rivers coming into it. The last guess I heard was 30 million pinks came into Valdez this year, there were so many fish they allowed the commercials to just strip the eggs and dump the carcasses. I haven't heard estimates on silvers but it was expected to be a good year.
I fully understand your salmon situation in CA. I used to live at Iron Gate salmon and steelhead hatchery on the Klamath and the river looked like you could walk across the salmon below the dam, now they suck so much water from the river the salmon die before making it upriver. Maybe CA should do like AK and put their hatcheries in tidewater so it won't matter if the rivers can't support fish.