Salmon fishery news as dire as expected.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

Slim. Slimmer. And none.

Those are the options for recreational coho salmon fishing in the Pacific Ocean along the central and southern Oregon coasts this summer.

As expected, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council provided little hope for sport or commercial salmon fishermen at its meeting in Sacramento, Calif. last week. Forecasts of extremely low run sizes for both chinook and coho salmon left the PFMC with little wiggle room.

For the selective coho (adipose fin-clipped-only) sport fishery between Cape Falcon and the Oregon-California border, the council sent three options out for public hearing.

The Oregon hearing will be March 31 in Coos Bay. Up for discussion at that hearing will be:

Option No. 1: A quota of 10,000 coho - compared to 50,000 last summer. The season would open June 22 and run seven days a week until the quota was filled or Aug. 31, whichever came first.

Option 2: An even more scant harvest allowance of 6,000 coho. That season would also open June 22, but fishing would be limited to four days per week (only one day of which could be on a weekend).

Option 3: No coho season at all.

On the chinook salmon side of the ledger, the options are even more limiting for the management zone that extends from Cape Falcon (near Tillamook) to Humbug Mountain (near Port Orford).

Option 1 calls for a reduced bag limit (of one salmon per day) and a short season (April 15 through June 15).

The other two chinook options call for closed seasons.

All of the options that allow salmon fishing contain a provision restricting fishing in the Stonewall Bank groundfish conservation area to trolling only on days the all-depth recreational halibut fishery is open.

Off the northern Oregon Coast, in a management zone from Cape Falcon to Ledbetter Point, Wash., the options for coho fishing quotas range from 6,300 to 10,500.

Coho have always dominated the harvest by sport fishermen along the Oregon Coast, but only 276,000 of the silver salmon are expected to return to Oregon waters in 2008.

Of those, about 216,000 are expected to be fin-clipped, designating hatchery origin. Last year's coho run was about three times that size.

The situation for chinook is even more dire.

The Sacramento River run of chinook, which supplies most of the fish caught off the Oregon Coast, is at an all-time low. So low that biologists say spawning goals probably cannot be reached even if no chinook are harvested in the ocean.

The Klamath River chinook stock is also down in the key 3-year-old age class.

The final decision on 2008 ocean salmon seasons will be made at a Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting in Seattle April 7-12.

Based on the options on the table, however, opportunities for recreational salmon fishing on the Pacific Ocean this summer will be scant, at best.