Salmon on the Agenda for SUNDAY’S PFMC November Meetings
If you’re interested in restoring our Nor-Cal salmon population numbers, then please attend the PFMC Council Meeting on Sunday, Nov. 16 when the fish managers discuss SALMON management (Agenda Item G) as they start planning for the 2026 salmon season. Escapement numbers will be discussed and we need more salmon to return to the rivers to spawn. Sign up to make Public Comment for Sunday! Get your voice heard. Please watch our YouTube channel videos on SALMON to learn more.
Click on graphics below and links: Nov 13, 2025 – Nov 19, 2025
Agenda G4: Read the Supplemental Staff Presentation Sacramento River Fall Chinook FMP Amendment Planning.pdf
Letter from Nor-Cal Guides to the PFMC Council
November 12, 2025
Mr. Pete Hassemer
Chair, Pacific Fisheries Management Council
7700 NE Ambassador Place, Suite 101
Portland, Oregon 97220-1384
RE: Comments on Agenda Item G4
Dear Chair Hassemer,
The Northern California Guides and Sportsmen’s Association (NCGASA) appreciate the opportunity to communicate with you on a priority item under Item G4 of the upcoming PFMC meeting in Costa Mesa.
NCGASA is an association of hundreds of licensed fishing guides and over 3,500 sportsmen and women that work together to protect and increase hunting and fishing opportunities throughout California. NCGASA acts as a voice to represent all people who use California’s waterways and lands. We work closely with many other conservation organizations to make sure we leave a legacy to our children and grandchildren; the same access to outdoor recreation and appreciation for abundant wildlife and fisheries that were instilled in so many of us. More specifically for this letter, we represent the sportsmen’s voice of the guiding community that relies on California’s recreational fisheries to support and feed our families. Our footprint spans the breadth of California, including the Sacramento and Delta fisheries that have historically been freshwater salmon fishing hotspots.
NCGASA believes that our management strategies historically are a practice of managing to the minimum, rather than exploring ways to help improve the salmon fishery and species. We are constantly managing towards meeting the minimum for escapement, which is currently set between 122,000 and 180,000 on an annual basis (and more often than not set at 122,000). Furthermore, our ability to meet these objectives we set for ourselves is abysmal – a track record missing the target 12 out of the past 16 years is nothing to be proud about and suggests that something is very wrong (and this is before the recent years of closure).
Hatchery management practices currently dictate management strategies that, if the bare number of fish return (122,000 fish) to make egg harvest goals, are deemed successful, which isn’t always the case. There are multiple problems with this, including the deterioration of California’s inland fishery and the previous 3 years of complete/near complete closure of the salmon fishery. Additionally, in recent years we have not even met the basic objectives of the escapement target, failing to meet egg harvest objectives on both the state and federal side. In other words, managing to the minimum escapement 122,000 and hatchery expectations are not working, is destroying the inland fishery, and season after season bears this out.
As everyone knows, we should have been evaluating and updating the Sacramento River conservation objective as far back as 2011. PFMC did not start the process until 2023. We applaud the Sacramento River Working Group’s progress on this issue over the past two years and acknowledge that there is more work to be finished. However, one thing is already abundantly clear; the current 122,000 minimum is not supported by science, the end recommendations are eventually going to be significantly higher, and we need to start taking steps in that direction now. Therefore, we are recommending expediting the process of FMP amendment and starting stair stepping the escapement goal higher from 122,000 to 180,000 minimum in 2026.
We need to continue the work and evaluation of the Working Group on the modeling that our system relies on and to protect this public trust resource. But in the meantime, we must immediately take action to increase, and permanently set, a higher conservation objective for the Sacramento River system. We would like to suggest that the PFMC set new inland minimum thresholds while the Working Group continues its analysis at 180,000 annually, understanding that science is currently pointing to the need for even much higher numbers to ensure the long-term survivability of the species.
The minimum 122,000 escapement target, which we set in 1984, has significant repercussions for the inland recreational fishery and the health of the species as a whole. This target was established with one thing in mind – ensuring the bare minimum number of fish can return to the system for some natural spawning and to meet hatchery goals. What it does is eliminate the recreational inland river harvest. Hundreds of guides and tens of thousands of anglers recreate on inland rivers, and the PFMC targets all but ensure that the fishing is poor, that angler opportunity is diminished, that people who buy a license go home disillusioned and turned off from fishing. Couple this with one fish bag limit (which we have had recently prior to the complete closure) and angler enthusiasm in the system is at all time low and continues to crater.
As members of the communities representing Sutter, Butte, Sacramento, Placer, Yuba, Yolo, Solano, Contra Costa, Stanislaus, Shasta, Glenn, Colusa, and Tehama Counties, we are appealing to you to take urgent and necessary action to protect the remaining fishery that we currently have, and to adopt stronger standards for escapement to ensure viability and sustainability of the inland river fishery and to properly meet escapement goals.
Please contact me at jstone@ncgasa.org or via cell phone at 530-923-9440 to discuss further.
Sincerely, James Stone President
Northern California Guides and Sportsmen’s Association
Facebook Live Video: Friday, Nov. 14 at Noon
Note: James Stone will host a Live Facebook Video on Friday at Noon to give the membership an overview of what will happen at the PFMC meeting on Sunday when they discuss SALMON. You can find Part 1 and Part 2 of these videos on our YouTube Channel: NorCal Guides.
