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Spirit for fishing dies with salmon
As officials and sportfishers braced for a new flow of water from Oregon's Klamath Basin -- still days out in arriving and uncertain in its promise -- adult salmon continued to stack up as casualties.
By Michelle Cole
The Oregonian
September 28, 2002
The tide of the dead turned sport to grief in the Klamath River on Friday. As officials and sportfishers braced for a new flow of water from Oregon's Klamath Basin -- still days out in arriving and uncertain in its promise -- adult salmon continued to stack up as casualties.
So, too, did the spirits of those who earn a living here or arrive annually, like the salmon.
So, too, did the spirits of those who earn a living here or arrive annually, like the salmon.
"This is our 90 days of fame," said an ironic Scott Faas, who owns Riffle's
RV Park in Klamath Glen and has watched his tourist season collapse. "All
of October is canceled," he said. "I got my last two cancellations today."
Fishing is big in these parts. People from around the West and beyond know about the hefty, even memorable, runs of chinook and steelhead.
Only here.
Yet those runs now turn grotesque upon arrival.
And those who would fish them are repelled, saddened, banished.
John Dalby, a banker from Eureka, caught a couple of half-pounder
steelheads and threw them back. Standing in his waders, fly-fishing around
the carnage, he just wagged his head.
"This kill is just sad. Really sad," he said.
Larry Weiler, a retired painter, found himself stuck on the banks of the
river near Blue Creek after his boat broke down. Bloated salmon carcasses
-- some lingering more than a week now -- floated belly up and lined the
shores. He was overcome.
"There are some places," he said, "where you come around a turn and . . ."
His voice trailing off, Weiler simply covered his mouth with his hand.
It was the stench.
Mike Kuczynski, a guide who has been on the river every day since July, now smokes cigarettes as a way to mask the stink. It follows him home at night, in his hair and his clothes.
Yet Kuczynski, among the few who still have clients, could be one of the
last plying the Klamath's diminished waters this season, even though the
salmon will continue to arrive, in profuse number, for another two weeks.
"Our guides are going out of business before their eyes," said Craig Bell,
director of the Northern California Association of River Guides. "They're
telling people they take fishing not to bring their children along."
Bell said longtime guides who have led fishing and float trips on rivers
throughout the Pacific Northwest have never seen a mass death of adult
salmon like the one that has struck the Klamath.
Worse, it is likely to reverberate for years through local and regional
salmon populations, as potentially tens of thousands of the fish this year
fail to make it home to spawn. That means less work for the guides, as well.
Word will go out.
"It is a disaster," Bell said. "It's basically the largest kill-off of salmonids anyone knows of. There's no parallel to this."
Joining anglers on the river Friday were teams of scientists -- some
counting dead fish, others conducting onshore necropsies. They hoped to
learn a definitive cause of death.
Tresa Veek, a pathologist with the California Fish and Game Department,
peered into the insides of a young chinook. Long pairs of tweezers in hand,
Veek and Scott Foott, a pathologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, noted hemorrhaging in the intestine and tiny clots that looked
like air bubbles on the gills.
Their provisional diagnosis: The fish suffocated.
But they won't know for certain what killed this particular jack until
slides and samples they tucked into an ice chest, the kind intended to keep
a six-pack cold, are analyzed in the lab.
But the question foremost on the minds of anglers and scientists was
whether the die-off is slowing.
In some spots, the pale and puffed-up fish blended in with the rocks.
Redheaded buzzards and black crows feasted. Chunks of red salmon flesh high up on shore indicated the bears had feasted, too.
Once in a while a salmon or steelhead could be seen flapping on its side in
its final moments.
"I saw fewer fish dying today than on Saturday," said Dave Hillemeier, a
biologist and fisheries program manager for the Yurok Tribe. "But then
again," Hillemeier said, "I saw fewer live fish today than I saw on
Saturday, too."
The grim task of counting the dead fell to people such as Monica Hiner,
Greg Bates and Dave Westkamp, all biologists working for the Yurok Tribe.
Normally, on a day like this, they would be finishing stream restoration
projects, monitoring stream quality or counting fish -- only live fish.
By midafternoon, the team had counted about 2,500 dead fish -- whatever
they could see onshore, floating or underwater.
"I feel like the Red Cross going through a battle zone," Bates said.
The trio has developed a vocabulary to describe what they see. There's the
"floaters," the "creamers" and, for fish that have been dead for a while,
the "skinners."
Asked if they planned to go home and eat fish this weekend, they spoke
swiftly and in unison: "No. Nope. No way."
Normally at this point in the season there would be at least 20 gill nets
placed along the river. Many fish commercially here. Others harvest the
fall salmon and steelhead runs to carry them over the winter with salmon
jerky or fresh-frozen fillets. But on Friday there were no gill nets in
sight.
Mark Sanderson, a member of the Yurok Tribe who has fished with a gill net
for 21 years, explained: "Why put gill nets out just to snag dead fish.
And, after looking at this, who's going to want to eat the fish?"
Faas, the RV park owner, was plainly angry.
He blames officials and politicians in Washington, D.C., for failing to
release upriver water in time to avoid the killings.
"I want everybody to know that the administration is making a mistake," he
said.
Staff writer Michael Milstein contributed to this report. Michelle Cole:
503-294-5143; michellecole@news.oregonian.com
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