CHARLESTON The fishermen talked of friends dead, insane or just ”gone away.”

In this roughhewn little port like many other Northwest coastal communities the waterfront once bustled with commercial salmon fishing boats, fish buyers, fish processing plants, fueling stations, marine stores, tackle shops, diners, saloons and men sometimes flush, sometimes broke making a living at the most dangerous occupation in America.

Today, it’s mostly gone.

In more than a decade, Pacific coastal commercial salmon fishing communities have lost nearly 4,000 jobs and several hundred million dollars, according to the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the Institute for Fisheries Resources.

In Charleston alone, salmon fishing has declined from about $12 million a year to $1.2 million.

Abandoned boats at a marine salvage yard in Charleston include many salmon trollers that the owners can’t afford to repair.Photo by Dean Guernsey/Copyright 2001, The Bulletin.

Up and down the coast, the salmon fishing industry has been battered by a number of factors from government restrictions to changing ocean conditions but the fishermen’s federation says a major factor for the decline has been Klamath Basin farmers’ reduction of the water quantity and quality in the Klamath River, once a major salmon spawning and rearing habitat.

”Every dead salmon is another fish that can never be harvested,” said Zeke Grader, Jr., executive director of the fishermen’s federation.

”Lives have been changed, shattered, a tremendous amount of pain in Charleston,” said Keith Wilkinson, a retired salmon fisherman and today a fisheries consultant on the Klamath Basin water situation. ”It’s a ghost town compared to the early 1980s.”

Salmon fishermen cite many reasons for the industry’s decline, including government restrictions, foreign fish farms, Indian treaty fishing rights, salmon-hungry sea lions, river habitat degradation, fish-blocking dams and other factors.

The fishermen said they are pleased more water will be coming down the Klamath River since the federal government shut off irrigation water in April to more than 1,000 Klamath Basin farmers in an effort to protect imperiled fish, including the coho salmon.

The farmers say their economic destruction is evidence of the high cost of protecting the environment, but fishermen see it as an example of how a species’ survival can be linked to economic survival.

”The Klamath water is just a piece of the puzzle,” said salmon fisherman John Warner. ”There’s a whole laundry list of controllable and uncontrollable things. You can’t blame it on the farmers. They’re just trying to make a living, too.”

Glen Spain, a spokesman for the fishermen’s federation, said its goal is to restore salmon fishing to its glory days. He said the irrigation water cutoff was a major step toward restoring spawning and rearing habitat.

”The rest of the factors are irrelevant compared to that,” he said. ”If they never hatch, the whole species is dead.”

Commercial coho fishing is prohibited in the Klamath Management Zone, an ocean area between Florence, Ore., and Fort Bragg, Calif., although a few coho are legally taken as incidental catches during fishing for other species.

The fishermen’s federation is part of a coalition that has proposed a plan to reduce agriculture in the Klamath Basin, restore wetlands and overhaul management of the basin’s limited water, where demand has exceeded supply for decades.

”We support the right of Klamath farmers to a fair share of the water, but they’re not entitled to take it all,” Grader said.

”Water left in the river has just as much economic value to coastal ports as it does used on the ground for Klamath Falls agriculture. A fisherman’s job is no less valuable than a farmer’s, a fisherman’s family no less deserving.”

Klamath basin agriculture has taken up to 90 percent of normal instream flows and left the remaining river water overheated and laden with pesticides and nitrates, said Spain.

The Klamath River was once the third most productive coho, chinook and steelhead salmon river in the United States, but today it is the most polluted river in Oregon in large part because of agricultural runoff and the destruction of wetlands that store and filter water, Spain said.

Klamath salmon populations have been reduced by nearly 90 percent and commercial salmon fisheries have long since been closed or severely restricted, Spain said.

The fishermen’s federation started the lawsuit that prompted the shut-off of irrigation water to the Klamath Project, which irrigates about half of the basin’s 400,000 acres of farmland.

It was the first time since the federal irrigation headgates opened in 1907 that the interests of farmers were made secondary to those of wildlife, fishermen and the Klamath and Yurok tribes.

Klamath farmers dispute the fishermen’s claim that agriculture has harmed the river. Bob Gasser, a farmers’ spokesman, said agriculture uses less than 5 percent of the basin’s total water supply. He said farmers’ spray irrigation contributes minimal runoff to the river and that the runoff contains no pesticides or other chemicals.

Gasser said the irrigation project actually has increased the amount of water in Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River by storing water that would otherwise evaporate.

Klamath farmers’ demands to restore the water and reform the Endangered Species Act have drawn national attention, but salmon fishermen said the slow strangulation of their livelihood, their families and their communities has been largely ignored for years.

Many Charleston salmon fishermen said improvements in the Klamath Basin’s water management will help, but that government regulations also need to be loosened, tribal fishing treaties amended, sea lion populations reduced, degraded stream habitats restored, government intra-agency coordination improved and other steps taken.

In nearly two decades, the Pacific Northwest’s salmon fleet has dwindled from 5,000 boats to about 1,000.

Charleston once had more than 400 salmon boats. Today, it has about 15 active boats. The rest have left, catch other fish or become derelicts, their owners too poor to fish, make repairs or even scrap them.

The community’s waterfront bars and greasy spoons have withered, and only a few fish processing plants remain, which the salmon fishermen say give unfairly low prices. The other plants are shuttered and rusting.

The price of salmon has fallen drastically, while the costs of fishing have risen insurance, licenses, gear, fuel.

Despite the decline of salmon fishing and logging, farming and boat building the Coos Bay area’s population has remained about the same in recent years as more retirees, tourism and recreation businesses move in.

Still, Charleston’s character has changed. Once teeming with salmon boats, businesses, trucks and people so busy it was hard to find a parking space Charleston’s waterfront is largely deserted.

”It’s the only living you know, but you can’t make a living at it,” Warner said.

Warner short, stocky, graying, five days’ beard, calloused hands, a quick talker, an optimist in a dead-end industry sat in a diner by the docks. The place smelled of fried clams and coffee and salty air.

Salmon fisherman John Warner releases fishing line on a recent trip in the Pacific Ocean.Photo by Dean Guernsey/The Bulletin.

He talked of fishing villages, their isolation, parochialism, toughness, their undramatic acceptance of death as part of the job, of the inexorable killing and maiming of commercial fishing.

He talked of fishermen some family men who stay for generations, some deckhands who come and go with the season and the seaman’s blend of optimism, fatalism and clannish distrust of outsiders.

He talked of of boarded-up storefronts, of jobs gone, of no government aid for fishermen like farmers receive.

He talked of fishermen friends who did not die on the ocean, who gave way to despair alcohol, drugs, violence, divorce when they were forced from the sea.

He stopped talking for a moment.

”Eight friends,” he said.

His voice choked. His eyes welled. He looked down, suddenly embarrassed, a tough man dabbing his eyes with a little paper napkin.

Eight men, he said, who committed suicide when they lost their boats. Another friend went insane, wandering the streets incoherently.

”You know, he’s getting released today” from a mental institution, Warner said quietly. ”These guys, they lost everything. The first few years, they were in denial. Whole families who lived here their whole lives.

”A lot of them moved on, driving a truck, construction, carpentry, something like that. But it’s hard to yank a guy off a boat and make him drive a tractor in Eastern Oregon.”

He talked of onerous regulations, irrefutable statistics, know-nothing politicians and bureaucrats and environmentalists and fisheries managers.

He looked down to the dock where salmon trollers have been largely replaced by elegant sailboats and yachts and sport fishing boats, where rubber-booted men smelling of fish, brine and sweat are outnumbered now by tourists and retirees crabbing off the docks.

He choked up again, forearms braced against the Formica, gripping his coffee cup.

”I have five kids,” he said, clearing his throat, ”and I made sure none of them became a fisherman.”

Warner, 53, and his wife Sandy also get income from their dockside tackle shop, although annual gross revenue has dropped from $600,000 to $80,000 and sport anglers have replaced commercial fishermen as their primary customers.

Other salmon fishermen have taken non-fishing jobs, but they still catch cod and other fish when they have time.

”You have to make a living,” said Ray Monroe, who today works for a soil and conservation district, keeping cattle out of streams and restoring stream banks.

Paul Heikkila followed his grandfather and father into salmon fishing, but today he fishes only in his spare time. He works as a marine extension agent in the Klamath Management Zone, where Klamath River salmon swim north and south along the coast after reaching the ocean.

”My reaction to the farmers losing their water was, ‘My God, we finally won one,’” he said. ”But you still feel for them. They’re suffering now, too, like we’ve suffered for years.”

Salmon fisherman Rayburn ”Punch” Guerin, 54, said Klamath farmers ”irrigated at our expense for a long time. A hell of a lot of fishermen’s families were hurt.”

But Guerin mostly blamed the state and federal governments.

Rayburn (Punch) Guerin, left, and Willie Shorb, both salmon fishermen, gesture as they discuss what they perceive to be a government bent on destroying their livelihood.Photo by Dean Guernsey/Copyright 2001,The Bulletin.

”Look, people in this country just got to decide whether we’re going to sit around and talk or let fishermen and farmers and loggers do their jobs. The government should just go away and let us solve the problem.”

Like Guerin, Willie Shorb, 58, is another veteran salmon fishermen who now catches albacore, crabs and anything else he can find.

The two men accused the government of corruption, incompetence and ignorance of the sea.

”They tell us to do that and do this,” Shorb said. ”It just makes matter worse.”

On a recent day, it was raining and windy. A storm kept most fishermen in port. Shorb looked out at the sea.

”A lot of guys went broke,” he said, ”and then, well, they just went away. Gone away. That’s all. They had to feed their families.”

Despite the odds, a few young fishermen still see a future in salmon. Fred Stufflebean, 28, has been going out on salmon boats since he was 12. Last year, he bought an old trawler, fixed it up and became a skipper.

”I finally found out what love was,” he said. ”It was my own boat.”

A few months later, the boat was damaged by an electrical fire. He couldn’t afford the repairs and had to sell it. Today, divorced with two children, he’s a deckhand again. Some years, he makes $50,000, other years barely enough to pay the bills.

Fred Stufflebean, a salmon fisherman, passes the time playing pool in a waterfront bar, which – like many other Charleston businesses which were once thriving – are now nearly deserted.Photo by Dean Guernsey/The Bulletin.

And he still hopes to become a salmon boat captain again.

”You don’t do it for the money,” he said. ”You do it because you love it.”

Overlooking the bay is a memorial to local fishermen lost at sea a bronze bust of a man, smiling, clad in rain gear, gripping the wheel in a storm. The names of the dead are many. They are etched in stone.

”Fishermen are eternal optimists, but 10 years from now, there will be no salmon fishing fleet,” Warner said. ”The older guys will retire and no young guys can make a living at it. It’ll be history, just something in books for kids to read about.”

John Cramer covers the environment for The Bulletin.