Central Valley Fisheries Cannot Rely

on Good Weather and Hatcheries for Recovery

Join, Renew, or Donate to California Sportfishing Protection Alliance 

As 2025 ends, we at CSPA see reasons for hope and many causes for concern.  

On the bright side, runs of spawning salmon in 2025 are looking good in many places across Central Valley and the greater Bay-Delta watershed. This is mostly due to the wet water year in 2023, when the adult salmon returning to rivers in 2025 hatched and matured in fresh water. In some cases, it is also due to smart hatchery management, including the trucking of juvenile salmon from hatcheries to the Bay-Delta estuary and to the ocean.

In May 2025, more than 1,200 spring-run Chinook salmon showed up in the Tuolumne River, where their past numbers had been in single digits. Butte Creek also had a strong run of spring-run salmon. Numbers of fall-run Chinook salmon are strong on the Stanislaus and the Mokelumne, and very strong on Battle Creek.

Putah Creek near Winters saw high numbers of fall-run Chinook salmon, thanks in part to advocacy from Flyfishers of Davis and other individuals and organizations. Together, they reconfigured a diversion structure that had blocked salmon passage for decades. 

It looks like we’ll be able to fish for salmon in California in 2026.

But the long-term prognosis for Central Valley salmon, the backbone of the state’s commercial and sportfishing industries, continues to be poor. Long-term trends of returning salmon in the Central Valley are in decline, even with upward spikes in wet and above normal water years. Central Valley salmon runs are ever more dependent on hatchery production. Wild salmon as a percentage of total production is particularly depressed and depressing.

So much water is diverted out of the Central Valley watersheds that only very wet years produce improvements for fish. Real threats like the proposed Sites Reservoir and the proposed Delta Tunnel seek to take ever-bigger bites out of the few good water years that remain.

For the past forty years, CSPA has worked hard to put more water in Central Valley rivers and ensure that this water flows through the Delta and into San Francisco Bay. Since we can’t legislate the weather, please support CSPA. We appear in hearings and in court to argue for abundant water in Central Valley rivers and the Delta. Our goal is to restore fisheries in California for ourselves and our grandchildren.

You can donate, join, or renew your membership by check or online via Apple Pay or Stripe on Donorbox. We welcome contributions of any size, as well as your ideas, comments, and questions. We look forward to defending the interests of people who fish, and people who love the places fish live, in 2026. Happy New Year!

Together, We Can Recover Central Valley Fisheries