The Salmon Are Here. The People Are Ready. So Why Only Six Days?

The Salmon are back

Not maybe. Not hopefully. Not “kind of.” They’re here — in big numbers. I saw it with my own eyes. I was out there on June 6th when the Northern California recreational salmon season opened — for just two days. Our lines were bending in minutes. The fish were strong, aggressive, and abundant. We didn’t catch a single hatchery fish. Every salmon we pulled in was wild — bred and born in the Sacramento River, fattened in the Pacific, and now back, right on schedule.

That’s not a collapse. That’s a comeback - or overpopulation.

Yet months before the first line was cast, the California Fish and Game Commission had already made up its mind. Based on projections from government biologists, the Commission decided that the salmon weren’t coming back — that spawning failures and degraded river conditions had decimated the population. So they slashed the entire recreational salmon season down to just six days: two in June, two in July, and two in August.

And they made that decision long before anyone had the chance to see what was actually happening on the water.

Why? Because the biologists had a theory.

They believed that years of drought, low river flows, and warming waters had made spawning impossible for the previous generation of salmon. That the eggs had “cooked” in the gravel. That poor conditions had doomed the run.

It’s a plausible theory. But it’s still a theory — a guess. A projection based on modeling. What it’s not… is fact.

Because here’s what the biologists didn’t know — and couldn’t know: what the salmon were doing out in the ocean. They didn’t track every current, every thermal pocket, every possible adaptation. But, guess what? Salmon are part of nature. And nature adapts. These fish didn’t survive for 100 thousands of years by waiting for ideal conditions. They find new routes. They shift timing. They go around obstacles. That’s what resilience looks like.

But instead of giving the people — the anglers, the charter captains, the families — the benefit of the doubt, the state acted out of fear. They locked down the season before it began.

And when that short June window finally opened, what happened blew their assumptions out of the water. Every boat out of Bodega Bay, Half Moon Bay, Sausalito — all reported the same thing: the fish were back. And in force.

John Sasson, a lifelong angler with over 50 years of experience in Northern California, put it plainly:

“From the second we dropped in our lines, it was clear. There are more salmon in the water right now than I’ve seen in my entire lifetime. I’ve been fishing here since I was a teenager — through good years and bad. Back in the day, catching three or four salmon was a great day. But this past weekend. The fish were everywhere. It wasn’t luck. It wasn’t hype. It was real.”

This wasn’t some miracle. It was nature doing what it does when given the chance. It was a system showing strength, not collapse.

And who was out there seeing it? Not hedge fund managers. Not political insiders.

Go down to the docks in Pillar Point or Emeryville and look around. These weren’t yacht-club elites. These were plumbers. Contractors. Delivery drivers. Teachers. Veterans. Retirees. Fathers and daughters. Grandfathers and grandsons. Real people.

They walked off those boats with 15 or 20 pounds of wild-caught salmon — not for show, not for social media — but to bring home clean, healthy protein for their families. Food they’d freeze. Meals they’d share. Nutrition they could trust. Not shrink-wrapped farmed fish from overseas. Not fast food. This was ours — local, sustainable, earned. And somehow, that’s what the state wants to limit.

This whole situation has a familiar ring to it. Remember COVID? “Two weeks to slow the spread” turned into two years of moving goalposts. Public health bureaucrats — often well-meaning but disconnected — imposed blanket restrictions based on worst-case models. And who paid the price? Not the elites. Not the laptop class. But the working-class Americans — the same people out on these fishing boats.

And now here we are again.

A handful of state biologists built a scenario. Regulators acted on it. And everyone else — the families, the charter captains, the coastal businesses — got boxed out. Again.

Six days isn’t a season. It’s a token. A fig leaf.

It’s fear dressed up as science.

It’s theory overriding observation.

And it’s a failure to trust both nature and the people who live closest to it.

Yes, our rivers need work. Dams, drought, and water policy have taken a real toll. But that’s no excuse to ignore what’s happening in the ocean. The salmon are back — and the people were ready.

They deserved more than six days.

Let the biologists adjust their models.

Let the policymakers focus on restoring rivers.

But above all — Let. The. People. Fish.