Byline: Paul Tolme
A disastrous crash in Pacific salmon closes the season. Fishermen wonder: will they come back?
Bill Dawson, the owner of San Francisco's Seafood Suppliers, has been in the salmon business for 35 years. Dawson has seen California's salmon harvest rise and fall, but this year's crash is unprecedented in his lifetime. "The salmon," he says, "have gone off a cliff. It's disastrous."
For the first time, federal and state fisheries officials have closed the season in California and in most of Oregon. The reason: only 90,000 fish returned last fall to the Sacramento River chinook run, down 90 percent from just a few years ago. Experts blame the ...