Thousands Of Rotting Salmon Bring Calls For Hatchery Changes

Tens of thousands of chum salmon are left to rot along Hood Canal each year - many of them dumped by commercial fishermen who ditch the males outright but strip the females of their valuable eggs first.

“In most people’s view, this is a highly inefficient and wasteful way of using fish,” said Bruce Crawford, deputy director of the Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The agency is deluged each fall with angry calls and letters from people appalled by the practice.

While Skokomish tribal fishermen are considered largely responsible, other commercial anglers likely are doing the same thing.

A worldwide glut of salmon has helped drive the price of chum down to 20 cents a pound, while the eggs - used as bait and also prized as a delicacy in Japan - are worth $8 a pound.

The waste enrages sport fishermen such as Noel Cinquabres, unable to hook a salmon as he picked his way along a shoreline littered with carcasses near the state hatchery here.

“It’s been going on for the last four or five years,” he said.

The stench of rotting fish sometimes is overpowering, said Ralph Hilligoss, who lives near the hatchery.

“Sea gulls pick them up and drop them on my roof and in my back yard,” Hilligoss said.

Skokomish tribal officials are trying to stop the onshore dumping. But they say the three state hatcheries on Hood Canal are compounding the problem by releasing too many chum salmon into the waterway.

“There’s a flood of fish that nobody wants,” said Jim Park, natural-resources manager for the tribe.

When this year’s run ends later this month, nearly 1 million fish will have returned to Hood Canal - at least half of them hatchery fish. And the hatcheries continue to release 30 million chum smolts each year.

Park and Crawford both say it’s time for the state to scale back hatchery production or switch to more valued salmon - coho or chinook, for example.

“Something has to change,” Park said. “If we raised fish that would bring in a dollar, there wouldn’t be a problem with wastage.”

Some biologists contend the millions of hatchery fish are glutting waterways and reducing the survival of wild runs.

But not everybody is unhappy about the situation. Some fishing operations are thrilled with the large numbers.

Commercial purse seiners catch chum as the fish enter Hood Canal, when they are in better shape than the battered salmon that make it as far inland as Hoodsport.

Big boats can make money where small ones can’t.

“I’d like to see the chum production in Hood Canal doubled,” said Robert Zuanich of the Purse Seine Vessel Owners Association.