13 million salmon into San Francisco Bay
Last week the Department of Fish and Game finished up its last of several trips from Red Bluff to San Pablo Bay. For the second year in a row, the CDFG has been transporting 6-inch salmon smolt from their Central Valley hatcheries to San Pablo Bay via aerated water trucks. The salmon trucking program is based on the belief that transportation directly from the hatchery into San Pablo Bay, as opposed to in-river releases, leads to more than double the amount of smolt that successfully reach the ocean. (No apparent regard is given to the smolt’s ability to survive in the ocean once they arrive).
During the research for Rivers of a Lost Coast we were enthralled with Jim Lichatowich’s Salmon without Rivers, a comprehensive guide to the history of Pacific Salmon management. Lichatowich derived his title for the book from a statement made by the Washington Department of Fisheries in the 1960s. “New advanced management techniques would soon result in salmon without a river.”
Sacramento salmon smolt are born in hatchery tanks, raised in concrete holding pens and trucked downriver to San Pablo Bay. The new management techniques have finally arrived. But we have only a shadow of the salmon in our Central Valley in comparison to the 1960s. How can that be?
