COOS BAY — To some commercial salmon fishermen, the season is over. The crystal ball is clear.

To other commercial trollers, sport fishermen, charter companies  and scientists, the work is just starting. Crisis management has begun for a summer that promises to be like no other in history.

Closure for most salmon fishing south of Cape Falcon on the northern Oregon coast is imminent, thanks mostly to low fall Chinook returns to the Sacramento River. The Pacific Fishery Management Council meets next week in Seattle to make final determinations.

The difference now is how various groups will react.

The salmon seven

This week, seven commercial trollers from Washington, Oregon and California traveled to Washington, D.C., to talk to lawmakers about problems on the Sacramento River — the river that contributes most of the fish to West Coast ocean salmon seasons.

But it’s not just the Sacramento they’re worried about. The Columbia River system has had ongoing problems and only two years ago, much of the commercial season in southern Oregon and northern California was closed due to low Chinook returns on the Klamath.

“The escapement index for north migrating Oregon coast fall Chinook has declined sharply for the past four years and the stocks failed to meet their post-season escapement goal in 2007 for the first time since 1983,” scientists wrote in a pre-season salmon report for the council.

Fishermen are asking for congressional hearings. They want an investigation. Why was this allowed to happen?

“What we see happening is what we see happening to all the major rivers,” California troller Duncan McClean said during a press conference call. “What was once determined to be a problem with Delta smelt is now working its way up to salmon.”

The trollers said more National Marine Fisheries oversight may be needed.

“At the fishermen’s level, there’s just an awful lot of questions about habitat conditions … as opposed to other reasons for fishery failure problems,” Newport troller Bob Kemp said.

In February, state and federal agencies noted that returns to most West Coast rivers and streams are down — for hatchery and wild fish, both Chinook and coho. Ocean conditions, specifically, a lack of upwelling that brings necessary nutrients to marine animals, were the main problem, the agencies said. Of more than 40 issues, the primary cause likely was changes in the ocean, but the combination of all of them could have contributed to low salmon returns.

The fact that it has happened to most stocks — not just the Sacramento — leads some to believe the main culprit could be ocean conditions.

Habitat, though, still is a major component in the Chinook life cycle, fishermen said.

“If the salmon were in a healthier condition, if the habitats were better … they’d be better able to withstand the ocean conditions,” Charleston troller Paavo Carroll said on the call.

Disaster relief

Trollers still are hoping for disaster relief. The seven in Washington, D.C., also lobbied for that.

The first step, a letter from the governors of Washington, Oregon and California to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez  requesting a fishery failure declaration, already has happened.

Governors Christine Gregoire, of Washington; Arnold Schwarzenegger, of California; and Oregon’s Gov. Ted Kulongoski sent that letter on March 14.

The next step is an actual declaration from the National Marine Fisheries Service, an agency within the Department of Commerce. That same agency — the one for which fishermen are asking for Congressional investigations and oversight — holds the key.

“There is absolutely no doubt there are very few fish out there,” NMFS Northwest Regional Administrator Bob Lohn said. “The ocean just didn’t provide the fish we expected to get.”

The agency already is working on the documentation to recommend a fishery failure declaration to Gutierrez.

“We know this is a bad year,” Lohn said. “And we know there is a strong interest in getting an answer back (to the states).”

Gutierrez would then have two options:

* declare the fishery a disaster under the Interjurisdictional Fisheries Act, which would trigger some options for Small Business Administration loans and combined federal-state assistance programs; and

* declare the fishery a failure under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which would then pave the way for federal disaster funding to flow to affected fishermen, businesses, ports, charter boat companies, etc. — if lawmakers can appropriate money and structure it so those entities could take advantage of it.

“We’ve gotten very positive support from the delegations,” Eureka, Calif., salmon troller Dave Bitts said.

Science and salmon

Everybody’s cashing in on this year’s salmon crisis — even scientists — and controversies over hatchery vs. wild fish, water diversions and genetic sampling are competing for space in print and media.

In California, Rachel Barnett-Johnson, a fisheries biologist with the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz, and Churchill Grimes, director of the NMFS Santa Cruz laboratory, published a paper on a new process that can distinguish between wild and hatchery-raised fish. The process involves otoliths, ear bones of fish, and the banding patterns on those bones. It’s similar to reading tree rings to determine the age of a tree.

But what is pertinent about their work, done in 2002, is that on a year when salmon runs to the Sacramento were abundant — 775,00 adult Chinook vs. the roughly 80,000 returning in 2007 — only 10 percent of the run was wild fish. About 90 percent of the returns were hatchery fish.

If those same percentages are applied to the expected 2008 returns of fewer than 60,000 adult fall Chinooks, only 6,000 would be considered wild.

“It’s a one-time estimate for that year, and these things do change over time,” Grimes said in a press release. “But it’s the most recent and perhaps best estimate we have.”

But here’s the rub: If that’s indeed the case (as scientists likely will be watching closely) two other words that mean a death knell for West Coast fishermen would become even more controversial — “threatened” and “endangered.”

Several court rulings have forced NMFS to look at whether hatchery fish should be considered the same as wild fish and whether some hatchery salmon stocks also should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. It’s an issue as thick and muddy as some of the streams salmon return to during high rains.

“The agency’s policy on counting hatchery fish has flip-flopped as a result of these different legal decisions,” Grimes said. “Now the focus is again on wild fish, and it doesn’t appear there are many of them. That could be bad news for fishing because, if the fall run is listed ... there would be no legal harvest.”

On Friday, fishermen and scientists from all three West Coast states said that critical genetic stock sampling studies could be in jeopardy because of the low returns to the Sacramento River.

“This is ground-breaking research that could allow resource managers to keep much of the ocean open for fishing, yet protect weakened runs of fish,” said Gil Sylvia, director of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, in a press release. “There are preliminary indications that salmon destined for certain river systems do behave differently, but we need more data from a broader sampling before any management implications become clear.”

For the past two years, the Collaborative Research on Oregon Ocean Salmon project has paired OSU scientists and commercial fishermen in a study to improve scientific knowledge about salmon behavior in the ocean. More than 190 trollers were trained in sampling protocols as part of the project, which was funded by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board.

Buoyed by the successes, the project leaders sought to expand their studies in 2008. The two years of field study focused solely on the ocean off Oregon. Broadening the scope of the research to include Washington and California is crucial, Sylvia said, because of the migratory nature of the salmon.

However, some salmon fishermen questioned at a hearing on March 31 whether the project should continue. If there are so few salmon out there, finding them would be difficult and stocks are so low that letting them rebound might just be the best choice.

McLean, one of the fishermen visiting Capitol Hill, said everyone is concerned about West Coast salmon, particularly the fleets who couldn’t fish in 2006 and, this year, the sport fishermen.

“(Salmon) is an icon the Northwest does not need to lose,” he said.