Salmon Return Celebrated

By Alison apRoberts, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Oct. 14–The morning fishing report at Lake Natoma on Saturday was full of tales of ones that didn’t get away.

“I catched one,” said Nicholas Mayo, who is 6, as he stood patiently, rod in hand, hoping to catch another.

“I did, too,” said his big brother Christian, who is 7.

“Now we’ve got all the boys hooked on fishing,” said their mother, Angelique Mayo, who was here with her husband, Angelo, and the couple’s five sons, ages 3 to 10.

The boys had an advantage as about 400 trout had been dumped into one end of the lake Saturday morning to make sure there would be lots of lucky fishing stories to take home from the 11th annual American River Salmon Festival.

The Mayo family from Fair Oaks had been happily reeled in to returning to the American River Salmon Festival, which they first attended last year. The event, at the Nimbus Hatchery and Lake Natoma, ends its weekend run today.

It is put on by the state Department of Fish and Game and the American River Natural History Association, along with many public and private organizations and hundreds of volunteers.

The guests of honor — the salmon — drew people to line the fish ladder as it cascaded down to the river. There were few fish that made it to their early welcome-home party, but those that did were rewarded with yelps of admiration from the audience, as they ascended with great splashes up the ladder.

“I don’t get how they go up,” said Dominic Davis, who is 14 and lives in Carmichael.

“There was a ginormous one,” said Nick Nosal, who is 5, pointing down at the base of the ladder. The boy, who walked over to the festival with his family from their home in Fair Oaks, stretched his arms out as far as they would go to demonstrate just how big the fish was.

At the top of the ladder, a tank held several mature salmon swimming around.

The return of the salmon — which typically doesn’t get going strong until next month — is one of the surest signs of fall in Sacramento, when the fish make their great, thrashing, final return trip home to spawn and die, leaving their aromatic remains on riverbanks.

The chinook — also known as king salmon — start their lives in freshwater rivers. Typically, they linger for just a few months before heading out to the ocean for three or four years before returning.

Scott Barrow, a senior biologist with the state’s Department of Fish and Game, doesn’t recommend holding your breath — or your bait — for a bodacious fall run this year.

“It’s bad looking at the past two or three years — it is significantly surprising,” Barrow said.

There are weather cycles and other factors that affect population counts, which jump up and down from year to year, without necessarily hewing to a straight-line trend.

Preliminary indicators, such as counts reported for sport and commercial fishing, suggest this season’s return crowd may stay below the 500,000 forecast.

“My guess is it’s going to come in somewhat less than that,” Barrow said.

Barrow’s guess is supported by current-season figures of salmon caught in the ocean.

This year, 43,000 Chinook were reported caught for sport in the waters off the California coast; in 2006, 84,000 were caught. For commercial fishing, the number caught was 94,000 this year, which sounds pretty good compared with the dismal total of 45,000 caught in 2006. But it doesn’t seem great if you consider the 256,000 caught in 2005.

The numbers of Chinook that make it 120 miles from the San Francisco Bay to the Nimbus Hatchery each year also jumps around. Terry West, a manager at the hatchery, said the fall run of 2005 numbered 22,349; last fall there were only 8,728.

That means the humans at the salmon festival probably outnumber the number of fish that will return home this season. At least 20,000 people are expected to come to the event, according to Bruce Forman, a naturalist with the state Department of Fish and Game and festival coordinator.

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