Giant King salmon captivates crowds

By ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

A 25-foot fiberglass King salmon named Fin joined Santa Barbara’s ubiquitous steelhead statues on State Street yesterday, drawing crowds of people who marveled at the massive, silver fish.
As kids climbed in and out of the mouth of Fin, organizers of the event at Paseo Nuevo delivered a message of conservation and restoration.
“We are on a five-week, five-state tour to raise public awareness to help restore wild Pacific salmon and steelhead trout,” said Joseph Bogaard, outreach director with Save Our Wild Salmon, which hosted the event along with the Community Environmental Council.

Save Our Wild Salmon activists are asking federal officials to remove four dams along the Snake River in Oregon they say kill young salmon and steelhead as they attempt to migrate to the ocean from their spawning grounds. The Community Environmental Council has been heavily involved in restoring local creeks, hoping to improve a dwindling steelhead trout population.
Bogaard described the Snake and Columbia rivers as the “world’s most significant basin for salmon.” Those four dams they are hoping to have removed are low-value, he said, used primarily to allow farmers to ship their products from inland states to the coast. A nearby railroad is a much cheaper alternative, and the use for those dams is quickly diminishing, Bogaard said.
“We’ve been on this sort of merry-go-round of legislation,” he said, explaining that since they are federally owned dams, it’s up to the federal government to keep or remove them. With the change of leadership in Congress, Bogaard said support on the federal level is growing.
“This is the first time we feel we can really get hearings going,” he said.
Mike McCorkle, a local commercial fisherman for close to 50 years, said fading fish populations are a real problem and applauded yesterday’s event. In recent years, he said he’s seen a drop in the number of salmon off Santa Barbara’s coast.
“This year there are some salmon, but they are too small,” McCorkle told the Daily Sound. Last year, he said, there were no salmon in local waters.
Due to the long distances that salmon migrate, habitat destruction in rivers in Northern California and Oregon affect local populations, Bogaard said. McCorkle agreed, saying that restoration efforts in the Sacramento River helped salmon and steelhead populations tremendously.
“You can have a good, healthy salmon population if you provide them with a good environment,” McCorkle said.
Organizers said they feel good about the support they are building in the community on their tour with Fin.
“The response from people we’ve been talking to has been fabulous,” Bogaard said. “The kids love to climb in the fish, and that gives us a minute to talk to the parents.”
The 25-foot salmon, when hooked up to their 25-foot RV, is also a major hit when it cruises along the highway, eliciting tons of honking and waving, Bogaard said.
Artists and activists built Fin in 1988 for a similar organization in Washington state that is “super-passionate” about protecting creeks there, organizers said. That group loaned the gargantuan fish to Save Our Wild Salmon for a tour through Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona and Nevada.