OCEAN SALMON OPENER A BUST, AGAIN : BUT ANGLERS WILL BE CHASING THE DREAM OF THE 1995 SEASON FOR SOME TIME.

Byline: Brett Pauly Daily News Outdoors Editor

The party boat skipper smartly summed up Saturday's lousy first day of ocean salmon fishing in Southern California.

``It's opening day for the fishermen, not for the fish,'' said Paul Rich, captain of the Ellie-M out of Gold Coast Sportfishing in Channel Islands Harbor.

And the fish just weren't around. Just like last year, not a single king, or chinook salmon was taken between the half dozen landings that represent the sport-fishing fleet in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Radio chatter suggested only a couple of undersize salmon were caught by the numerous private vessels that motored out under blue skies.

Unfortunately for the anglers who choose to make the salmon opener a tradition, the results are usually similar. It's salmon or bust, and most often it's bust.

Are we gluttons for punishment?

Probably not.

More likely, we're still chasing the dream that was the salmon season of 1995, when anyone who could handle a line often came home with two-fish limits. The sport-caught yield south of Santa Cruz for that year was greater than the combined catch total for the three seasons since; 1995's tally was more than five times greater than the top season high over the preceding 20 years.

`` '95 spoiled everybody,'' said Oxnard angler Mike Kover, who caught 38 kings in weekly outings that year, eight in one day alone. ``One angler came up to me and said, `You have to sit down,' because I caught my limit that day. I went on to boat six more, and doled them out to those who didn't catch any. By the end of the day, that guy was begging me for one of the fish.''

But even the opening day of the 1995 season wasn't great, offering little insight into the miracle to come. Since salmon are a rare exception to ocean species in that they have a regulated season - from the Saturday nearest March 15 to usually early September, or whenever federal officials choose to close the season - it is difficult to forecast the outcome of the season, let alone the success of the opener. No one can legally target salmon before opening day so little information is available before then.

``It's a crapshoot with salmon, that's just it,'' said Kover. ``If they are in here, you are going to catch them; if they're not, you're not.''

That's a stark contrast to predicting whether trout - the foremost freshwater fish with a regulated fishing season - will bite.

``With trout, most of them are stocked, so as soon as you put them in they are caught out that weekend,'' Kover explained.

Salmon anglers must hark back to 1997 for decent opening-day takes of kings, with their distinctive black gums. (Coho, or silver salmon have white gums; a threatened species in California, coho are unlawful to keep.) That's when more than a third of the salmon anglers aboard sport-fishing charters from Port Hueneme to Santa Barbara returned to port with a king in the gunnysacks. It was a standard rarely matched before - and certainly not since - in the region south of Point Conception not known for having productive salmon openers.

But, as Rich pointed out, there is frequently a positive from even the most negative salmon opener.

``After today I'll have a little more to tell the guys in the morning,'' said Rich, who in his nine years skippering rarely targeted salmon at all before 1995, which was to Southland salmon fishing what ``A River Runs Through It'' was to fly-fishing. ``They aren't quite going through here yet; hopefully it will get a little bit better here as the season goes on.''

Openers also draw anglers because they explore the unknown. . . and a shot at chasing something special like what 1995 held. ``Today you at least had a chance; you don't have a chance tomorrow,'' said Rich, who maintains it might well be another 20 years before a salmon bite is as wide open as '95.

Water temperatures were ideal - 54 to 55 degrees - for the cold-water-loving kings, there was plenty of bait swimming around and the brine was discolored, which salmon prefer, it is thought, to better sneak up on their prey undetected. But no bites.

The luck was only slightly better up north, where just six kings were boated Saturday by 122 anglers in Morro Bay and 51 fish for 407 anglers in Santa Cruz, according to Department of Fish and Game reports.

``Generally it's a fish per rod (to the north) once the season has gotten going,'' said Matt Erickson, a marine biologist for the DFG's Ocean Salmon Project in Healdsburg.

``But we're not real big into predicting,'' Erickson said of the largely unpredictable salmon. ``It's bad enough to go fishing on your own and predict how you are going to do, let alone predict for the entire state.''

But for all the uncertainties leading up to it and Saturday's terrible results, many anglers felt they were still better off.

``The best thing about today,'' said salmon-opener regular Chuck Littlewood of Rancho Cucamonga, ``the telephone didn't ring one time, and that's very important.''

SOUTHLAND SALMON STATS

A glimpse at the numbers of sport-caught salmon boated south of Santa Cruz during the past five years:

YEAR TOTAL

1998 42,700

1997 84,400

1996 44,800

1995 198,900

1994 24,000

Note: The previous high during the two decades prior to 1995 was 37,000 in 1989.

Source: Department of Fish and Game Ocean Salmon Project

CAPTION(S):

Photo, Box

PHOTO (Color) With the opening weekend's dismal salmon tallies this year, Moorpark's Joe Nunez must feel lucky he boated a chinook back in 1997.

Brett Pauly/Daily News

BOX: SOUTHLAND SALMON STATS (see text)