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Comment by kposehn | Hacker News Reader

I've been Salmon fishing in California since I can remember. There are few things I love more than being on the water going for Kings as the sun comes up.

I'm really bummed we won't have a season, but having more fish in the future is worth the short term cost.

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It can’t hurt, but I don’t think something like this is really going to fix the problem. Dams, water levels abs temperatures, ocean trawling, acidification … there’s lots and lots of stress on salmon population aside from anglers.

Fixing a multifaceted problem requires multifaceted solutions. It can definitely help.

The publicity from the cancelation seems like a really valuable aspect too

Absolutely. We definitely need to put a spotlight on this and other dwindling fish stocks. Even though there are other populations to draw from, once they're gone they are very, very hard to get back.

Car tire debris: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/03/coho-sal...

Local divers have been removing some tires but they can only get a tiny fraction of what has been dumped.

https://www.leeoceans.org/initiatives/ptlobos-tire-removal

There was a bombshell report about an immediate moratorium on crab fishing in Alaska, that came out of nowhere, seemingly. About a month later there was a (very, very quiet) report justifying the moratorium. The short version is that effectively scientists had been asking for reduction in fishing in the area for decades and finally the remaining stock in the area was so low it was critically endangering the ecosystem there. So they finally put in a hard stop after years of kicking the can down the road.

I suspect we'll see additional cessation of fishing in other areas as it further unravels that we've been chronically overfishing for decades.

Britain after WW2 overharvested mackerel from their seas for so long that they had to put permanent fishing quotas and even today the mackerel have not fully recovered from overfishing over half a century ago. Anglers have an enormous impact on fish and wildlife stocks.

See also cod fishing in Newfoundland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_fishing_in_Newfoundland

Cod stocks collapsed in the early 1990s, with a moratorium on fishing enacted in 1993. It took until 2011 for signs to show that the ecosystem was recovering.

The Atlantic (2016) is a good documentary on natural resources in Ireland and Newfoundland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtRHSWGYNFc

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5744820/

My understanding is that the cod are not expected to recover to numbers previously seen at all, though. The smaller number present today seem likely to comprise a permanently smaller proportion of the new habitat that has formed in their absence.

I looked into this many years ago so perhaps that has changed. I hope so. Otherwise it means the Canadian Atlantic was irreparably altered by modern fishing in the blink of an eye, and the rest of the world is working hard at doing the same thing right now.

They did a moratorium on crab fishing by crab fishermen but allow trawling for groundfish that a) picks up crab as bycatch and b) destroys their spawning grounds.

It’s not a great example of an effective policy response.

Yeah I suspect there's quite a lot of claw back by local government. Fishing is a rare industry where most boats are owner-operated and almost all their revenue is funneled back into the local economy (shipyards, shiphands who are employed on the boats themseves, marinas (usually owned by the city) etc) so for a place like alaska getting rid of fishing is hugely crippling for their local economy and the people who work in those towns. Take away fishing and the economy in these towns stops. There is no Fortune 50 company with infinite pockets to swoop in and "make things right" either via the goodness of their own hearts, or by lawsuits.

And this is the irony of short-termist policy making. By blocking reforms in order to maintain some localized status quo, you are very often dooming the future of that localized status quo. Instead, you should be planning ahead to scale it down or transition out of it entirely, and attempting to help people make that transition smoothly over the course of a generation. Ultimately it's just another form of greed and selfishness: "my desires today are more important than your needs tomorrow."

Yes, and never once did any of these owner-operator fisherpeople say: "Hey, we might be overfishing. Let's fish less." In my whole life, it is 100% opposition to any quotas. They are fishing themselves into poverty. It is bizarre. The future is aquaculture for 90+% of what we eat from the oceans/rivers/lakes.

Has anyone figured out how to make aquaculture sustainable? Last I checked it was so bad that it was actually worse than catching wild fish

It depends on the species. "Sustainably farming carnivores" is not a thing that actually exists on land or sea, and a lot of people's favorite fish are carnivores. Herbivores like tilapia could often be raised on agricultural waste, but in practice are raised on corn and soy.

> There was a bombshell report about an immediate moratorium on crab fishing in Alaska, that came out of nowhere, seemingly. About a month later there was a (very, very quiet) report justifying the moratorium. The short version is that effectively scientists had been asking for reduction in fishing in the area for decades and finally the remaining stock in the area was so low it was critically endangering the ecosystem there. So they finally put in a hard stop after years of kicking the can down the road.

The Atlantic cod industry waves hi.

Or, it would, if there was still an Atlantic cod industry.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Atlantic-cod-...

You had me until the last sentence:

    Anglers have an enormous impact on fish and wildlife stocks.

In English, the term "anglers" generally means hobby fishers -- hook and line, if you like. Are you saying that individuals have an enormous impact? I doubt it. I tried to Google about it, but I find nothing. The damage is mostly caused by industrial fishing and global warming.

I'm saying I'm refuting his statement, and using his language and wording to add impact and tie my post to his.

Understood. Thank you to clarify!

It won't fix it for sure, but it will help. Reducing the pressure on the population can go a long way to improving future prospects.

Luckily, the dams start coming down this year. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/18/klamath-river-dam-rem...

To add to the doom and gloom.

https://www.science.org/content/article/common-tire-chemical...

The article doesn't seem to mention whether they are only canceling the season for big time commercial fishing or for all fishing altogether. I suspect it's the latter. Too bad that the government can't seem to grasp the concepts of scale and profit motive. The wildlife populations are getting wrecked from large scale fishing operations mass-scraping the sea clean, not from Joe Sixpack dipping their rod in the ocean on the weekend and hoping to come home with one or two fish.

Sport Fishing can put a huge amount of pressure on stocks too. During the salmon season there are hundred of boats off Stinson Beach (NW of the golden gate) fishing, same for Pacifica and Half Moon Bay. For every commercial boat there are many, many smaller boats. It all adds up.

The ratio of commercial:recreational quoatas depend on the numeric value for the season, but at lower quotas the ratio skews heavily recreational. So when the run is substantial, commercial fisheries can fish, but when the run is marginal, more of the quota is recreational:

Allowable non-treaty ocean harvest (thousands of fish)

  Coho:    C  R
  0–300    25 75
  >300     60 40
  Chinook: 
  0–100    50 50
  >100–150 60 40
  >150     70 30

Source: Page 10 of https://media.fisheries.noaa.gov/2022-10/2022-Fed-Reg-Bookle...

Do you happen to know if there are any places in California to go fly fishing, if any? My curiosity deriving from David James Duncan's The River Why and Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It.

There are a ton of excellent places. You can go for steelhead in the Klamath and Trinity rivers, lots of trout in the Sierra Nevada mountains (I'm partial to the Truckee River watershed), and if you want to try something really different go for striped bass on a fly in some of the Central Valley Foothills reservoirs in late-August or September. I've even gone surf-fishing on fly for Skates and sharks in San Diego at the beach.

There's a lot of different fly fishing experiences in California from traditional trout to really unique stuff. Please do try some out!

Bummed as well. Just got into fishing a few years ago. Was going to get a fishing kayak this spring for catching salmon off the coast but now I guess I'll wait.

Might be worth going for halibut this year. If the coastal waters are still super cold it should keep the SF bay quite active for the season, so you could always try hitting the sand flats off South SF. I haven't done it myself but others had great luck last year.

Good idea. That's actually what I've mainly been fishing for around Tiburon. I've had pretty good luck there.

I have heard from people who do love fishing that getting a decently cheap flight to Alaska is totally worth it specifically for Salmon

I've gone there several times but stopped when things got too crowded. They've also seen a significant decline in stocks I believe, especially along the inside passage.

Seems like you could just go farther in or somewhere else no? Alaska is an absolutely MASSIVE state

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