For the first time since 2022, commercial boats are once again hauling chinook salmon out of California’s coastal waters, a modest but symbolic revival for an industry that spent three straight years tied to the dock. State and federal managers reopened the ocean salmon fishery this year after forecasts showed key runs rebounding, yet the fishermen and scientists closest to the resource caution that the recovery rests on shaky ground.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council voted in April to permit both commercial and recreational salmon fishing off California in 2026, ending a closure that stretched across the 2023, 2024 and 2025 commercial seasons. According to the California Ocean Protection Council, recreational anglers had only six open days in 2025 after total closures the two years before, and the multiyear shutdown was driven by drought, warming rivers and collapsing fish populations.
The numbers behind the decision help explain the cautious optimism. The Ocean Protection Council reported that scientists projected nearly 400,000 adult Sacramento River fall-run chinook returning this year, more than double the prior year’s estimate, with the Klamath River fall-run forecast at roughly 176,000 adults, also more than double. Officials noted that the 2025 Klamath return came in at about 51,400 adults, close to 180 percent of what had been projected, a stronger-than-expected showing that fed directly into the choice to reopen.
A cautious, tightly managed season
This is not a return to business as usual. The reopened season carries trip limits, regional harvest guidelines and in-season monitoring that can trigger early closures, a framework the Ocean Protection Council described as being used for the first time in the state’s commercial salmon fishery. Inside Climate News reported that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife warned it could cut allowable catch further or shut fishing on scheduled open days if summer harvest limits approach their ceiling.
The stakes are large. As reported by Inside Climate News, the Golden State Salmon Association estimates that California’s salmon industry generates about $1.4 billion in economic activity and roughly 23,000 jobs in a normal season, while also contributing some $700 million and more than 10,000 jobs in Oregon.
James Stone, a Yuba City fisherman who serves as board president of the NorCal Guides and Sportsmen’s Association, told Inside Climate News that the lost seasons have hollowed out the infrastructure that coastal fishing depends on, from marinas and tackle stores to bait shops and port fuel pumps, because salmon is what drives the broader industry. His association, he said, represents 4,000 members and more than 500 businesses. Cameron Smith, a Benicia-based commercial captain with more than two decades on the water, put the predicament bluntly, telling the outlet that fishermen who tried to switch to species like Dungeness crab and cod found there was little to pivot to amid high fuel costs and inflation.
Federal aid, and complaints it falls short
On June 17, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced $123.6 million in fishery disaster funding nationwide, including $21.3 million for California’s Sacramento River and Klamath River fall chinook salmon fisheries. The relief followed months of pressure from Rep. Jared Huffman, and it roughly matched the $20 million California salmon fisheries received in an earlier 2024 disaster allocation. Stone argued the sums are too small, telling Inside Climate News that many of the businesses he represents lost $50,000 to $100,000 apiece but received only a few thousand dollars each in the previous round.
Decades of decline and a warming ocean
The recent crash sits atop a much longer slide. Landings data cited by Inside Climate News from the Pacific Fishery Management Council show commercial troll catches ranging from about 518,000 fish in the mid-1970s to more than 765,000 in the early 1980s; by 2019 the statewide catch was 271,489, and the three years before that fell to between roughly 42,000 and 78,000 fish. Scientists and fishermen point to a mix of drought, dams, river diversions and development, compounded by climate change.
Nate Mantua, who leads the Landscape and Seascape Ecology Team at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, told Inside Climate News that a warming Pacific, including the record “Blob” marine heat wave from 2014 to 2016 and another warm stretch in 2026, is squeezing the salmon’s ocean habitat even as hotter watersheds strain their freshwater habitat. Steve Lindley, a fish ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a former director of NOAA’s Fisheries Ecology Division, argued that rebuilding resilience means reducing the fishery’s heavy reliance on hatcheries, which release fish on similar schedules that can fail when conditions do not line up.
Signs of recovery
There is real progress alongside the warnings. The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom has credited its “California Salmon Strategy for a Hotter, Drier Future” with restoration gains, including habitat projects and the reintroduction of chinook to waterways where they had vanished. The 2024 removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history, has already allowed salmon to reappear in Oregon tributaries where they had been absent for more than a century, according to the Ocean Protection Council.
The cultural toll has been steep. The Ocean Protection Council noted that the Yurok Tribe, for whom salmon is central to identity, has not served the fish at its annual Klamath Salmon Festival since 2023, the first such gap in the event’s 60-year history. Meghan Hertel, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, has called salmon the “lifeblood of tribal cultural heritage and nutrition” and the “backbone of river ecosystems.”
Out on the water, the mood is guarded hope. Jared Davis of the Golden Gate Fishermen’s Association told Inside Climate News that after three hard years, things are looking up, even as daily catches swing wildly from a full limit one day to a handful of fish the next. Scientists are cautious for a reason: as the Ocean Protection Council put it, the wet winters that recently helped juvenile fish survive are not guaranteed, and the populations recovering now will still have to weather future droughts, wildfires and a warming ocean.
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