CARMEL VALLEY — Brian LeNeve has been fishing for almost 70 years, but he hasn’t dropped a line in his hometown river for the last 15. He says fishing in the Carmel River isn’t worth the risk of harming a steelhead trout – a threatened species.
But this past winter’s pounding rains, coupled with the 2015 removal of the San Clemente Dam, have given hope to LeNeve and other local fishermen that steelhead could make a comeback on their beloved river.
“This year was a great year for fish,” LeNeve said. “Most people are thrilled the San Clemente Dam is gone because it is one step to turning the steelhead numbers around.”
For centuries, steelhead thrived in this region. But the San Clemente Dam, built in 1921, blocked the river’s flow and undermined its ability to maintain an optimal environment for steelhead.
And it’s not just the Carmel River where steelhead are hurting. All California steelhead populations south of San Francisco are listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. That is
why the steelhead fishing season is short and highly regulated. Fishermen who actually nab a wild one are required to release it.
Like so many fishermen, LeNeve, president of the Carmel River Steelhead Association, holds the steelhead in high regard.
“I don’t believe there is any other type of fish that compares to steelhead,” he said. “The more I learn about them, the more amazing they are.”
They swim twice as fast as salmon — about 23 miles per hour, LeNeve noted. And steelhead are also scrappy swimmers that can leap more than 10 feet above the water in a single bound, jumping higher than salmon by several feet.
In just the past few months, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Amy East has observed rapid transformations each time she visits the Carmel River.
“This river has had more floods and larger floods than it’s had in many years,” she said.
The Carmel Valley this year saw four major floods – a combined flood pattern that has a one-thousandth of 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Just downstream from the old dam site, the water rose about 10 feet higher than its low-flow average. And it’s still flowing strong this summer.
The high and fast-moving water has carried debris and eroded riverbanks, changing the river landscape from simple to complex and making it a lot more hospitable for steelhead.
The reservoir behind the San Clemente Dam had steadily filled with sediment since the dam’s
construction nearly a century ago. That not only reduced its effectiveness as a dam, but also turned it into a seismic hazard.
“It was the least safe dam in California,” said Doug Smith, a professor in the School of Natural Sciences at Cal State Monterey Bay.
The choice was to remove it or find some way to buttress it. “So the decision was made to take it down,” Smith said.
The dismantling of the San Clemente Dam two years ago was the largest dam removal project in California’s history. And fishing guide Allen Bushnell, a Santa Cruz resident, couldn’t be happier.
When it’s time to reproduce, Bushnell said, adult steelhead migrate from the Pacific Ocean up freshwater rivers to lay their eggs in gravel spawning beds. The San Clemente Dam, however, made it nearly impossible for the fish to access essential spawning habitat on the Carmel River. But now that the dam is gone, spawning grounds upstream are easily accessible to the fish.
“We don’t have many steelhead in California anymore because you shut the door on their bedroom,” Bushnell said. “They can’t make babies. When you put a dam in between the ocean and where they spawn, then fish can’t get there — and pretty soon you’re not going to have any fish.”
For decades, steelhead had to climb a tall fish ladder to get over the dam. The ladders required the migrating fish to leap up many small step pools. Now that the dam is gone, however, the fish no longer face that task, which was particularly daunting during floods and droughts.
NOAA Fisheries biologist Tommy Williams is conducting a before-and-after study in which he will track exactly how the dam removal has affected the population of steelhead trout.
So far, he has found that winter floodwaters wash away debris that once was trapped behind the dam to new locations downstream. And when he walks along the river, Williams finds patches of what he calls “the perfect-sized gravel,” which didn’t exist before the floods.
“Now we’re reintroducing this gravel that’s been behind the dam, and it’s spreading itself across the stream channel for spawning,” he said. “So that’s why you are watching all of us fish people getting excited about seeing these pockets of gravel.”
The rapidly flowing river is also creating tiny pools, side channels and islands. Drifting trees in the river, which would have been caught behind the dam, are now free to move downstream.
It may look messy to passers-by, but the wooden debris, pools and channels are important habitats that steelhead can use as refuge — an important energy-conserving strategy for migrating fish. These areas provide shade and pockets of slow-moving water that help fish struggling to swim upstream.
Yes, even steelhead need a break.
Williams already is seeing more juvenile fish in the river, early signs of a population recovery. And Peter Moyle, professor emeritus of fish biology at UC Davis, says that a population comeback in the Carmel River could bolster populations in neighboring rivers from the Pajaro River all the way down to the Big Sur rivers, where steelhead also are struggling.
“Steelhead are amazing in their ability to move between watersheds and repopulate rivers,” said Moyle, who sees “more hope for steelhead in the long run than for salmon” because of their adaptability due to genetic diversity.
Williams doesn’t expect the population to recover immediately. He says in addition to the dam, a combination of factors led to the shrinking population, including poor water quality and non-native predators like striped bass.
“Removing the San Clemente Dam is one piece of the puzzle. It is a big piece, but it isn’t the only piece,” said the Carmel River Steelhead Association’s LeNeve.
Despite the work left to be done, LeNeve is more optimistic about a Carmel River than ever:
“We’ve turned a river around from one of the 10 most threatened in California to one with hope.”
