Captain Mike Hudson heads out under the Golden Gate Bridge into the cool nighttime air, the noise of a few overhead cars drowned out by the clacking of his diesel engine. His destination, 68 miles north of San Francisco, is the sleepy little coastal town of Bodega Bay. “Everybody and their brothers will be up there,” Hudson says about a harbor so small, 120 visiting trollers will have to be side-tied to one another at the dock. “There is good strong current surge with a narrow harbor access, and if the first guy doesn’t tie his boat down well, it ends up being bad for everyone.”

Hudson and other salmon fishermen like him must reel in between $15,000 and $20,000 a year to cover their costs. Every trip is crucial, since the National Marine Fisheries Service (N.M.F.S.) closed the fishing season for the month of June, in order to give local wild king salmon stocks an opportunity to replenish. The cost of wild salmon is much higher than that of the farmed variety, but money isn't the only thing dividing these two silver-skinned spawners. Salmon are caught in a sea of controversy.

Salmon farming took off in Washington and British Columbia during the 1980s in hopes that it would create jobs and preserve wild stocks. But today it threatens the livelihood of West Coast fishermen by creating a cheaper product competing with year-round availability. Fishermen say farmed fish are lower quality, although farmers and hatchery workers claim otherwise. Environmentalists and scientists have also raised concerns about adverse affects of net pen farming on the oceans. Even chefs have become divided on whether the two fish taste different, some adamantly supporting the cause of the fisherman over the farmer.

The Klamath, Snake and Columbia Rivers between Northern California and Oregon’s border have become political pawns in fishing communities over the past 40 years, further weakening the fishermen’s resources. The rivers are the largest waterways to spawning grounds for wild Pacific salmon, but dams built for recreation, hydroelectricity or agriculture greatly hinder passage and drastically reduce populations. "Every drop that comes out of the rivers and is used for something else is a drop wasted,” Hudson says. “The fish really need that water to survive.”

Earl Steele shakes his head and chuckles when he sees trucks with bumper stickers that say, “Don’t do drugs, don’t eat farmed salmon.” The farmed salmon the stickers speak of could very well come from his drug-free hatchery at Bellingham Technical College. “Lots of people will say that hatchery fish are garbage fish,” Steele says, “but most people can’t differentiate between a hatchery fish, a farmed fish or a wild fish.” Hatchery fish are used to increase wild stocks, and to "plant" the farmed fish.
“People talk about feeding farmed salmon growth hormones,” he says. “I say, hockeypuck! I know farmers up here who pay as much as $2 a pound for their fish food.”

Fish farmers have been accused by environmental groups of feeding salmon higher amounts of fat or hormones in order to achieve a larger size. The Environmental Working Group released test results which found higher levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in farmed salmon than in wild. PCBs are carcinogens stored in the fats of fish and beef that can be harmful to humans in high concentrations.
“They talk about feeding the fish high in fat, concentrating the PCBs, but flesh is equivalent to protein. You have to feed protein to the fish in order to create protein,” Steele says. “People talk about dyeing the fish with chemicals, but they are fed a carotene at two parts per million. That is not dyeing a fish, it’s replacing the carotene found by the wild salmon in their natural diet.”

Steele is referring to astaxanthin, a group of natural pigments called carotenoids, produced primarily in nature by plants and microscopic algae. Shellfish, a staple of the wild salmon’s diet, are tinted red by an accumulation of the pigment.

But, according to Zeke Grader, executive director of the non-profit Institute of Fisheries Resources, there are other chemicals, fungicides and neurotoxins used by Washington salmon farms that reduce net moss or lessen the effects of sea lice. “If someone tries to serve me farmed salmon in a restaurant,” Grader says, “I’ll raise my voice so other diners can hear me as I yell at the waiter, ‘Farmed salmon! What are you trying to do? Poison me?!’"

“The government simply using the seafood deficit as an excuse for farming salmon is a flat-out lie, just as much as WMD [weapons of mass destruction] is a flat out lie,” Grader says, sitting back in the chair of his Presidio office. It takes three to five pounds of protein to produce one pound of salmon, which results in a net decrease of overall protein production when it comes to feeding the masses.

“I can understand where fishers are coming from,” says Steele, who commercially fishes wild salmon in Bristol Bay, Ala., during his off-summers. "The fishers are an endangered species and they need to fight for everything they do, any way they can.” That includes misleading the public, according to Steele.

Most of the salmon farmed in the United States goes to white-linen restaurants. It is the massive quantities–as much as five times the amount of United States and Canadian production–shipped in by container from Chile and sold in grocery store chains that affect the market price. “The salmon farmers of the Northwest take a beating when Chilean farmers have low labor costs, little overhead and no environmental regulations,” Steele says.

Royal Hawaiian ships fresh seafood to Bay Area restaurants from San Francicso’s Dogpatch, located halfway between the Bay and San Francisco International Airport. Mitch Gronner, one of Royal Hawaiin's account managers, wears a white elastic hairnet while walking through the refrigerated warehouse. “We get fish from all over the world, like right here,” he says, slapping his hand on a 50-pound Styrofoam box stacked five high. “From Stolt Farms we have Sterling, a brand of Washington farmed that is popular among chefs because they market themselves well."

“And these kings are from Scotland,” he says as he opens a plastic case with identical looking salmon, healthy pink cavities and a glistening silver skin. “This is Loch Duart from Scotland, the stuff served at Wimbledon and restaurants like The French Laundry.” Loch Duart prides themselves on their environmentally friendly farming procedures. They are also reportedly the first farmed salmon soon to be promoted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “Seafood Watch” consumers guide program.

Gronner points to a massive bin of local wilds that just came in, none of which are Captain Hudson's. The 40 big salmon he catches trolling the shallows between Stinson Beach and Point Reyes will be sold exclusively at farmers’ markets.

“Loch Duart? I think they are frauds,” Zeke Grader says. Grader recognizes that some fisheries are trying to do the right thing by lowering the densities of fish in pens or cutting back on the use of antibiotics. “But they are only two steps along in a 12-step program,” he says.

There is a code of conduct written by the Washington Fish Growers Association in 2002, “but the problem with the code is that it was written by the growers themselves, so it probably won’t pass muster with a single environmental group,” Grader says.

Chefs have also become involved and remain divided on the flavor differences between wild and farmed salmon. Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse passionately promote wild salmon, while other chefs, such as The French Laundry’s Thomas Keller, still serve farmed salmon as part of a $175 tasting menu. Most fishermen and chefs claim farmed salmon is fattier, with a muddy flavor from fishmeal. But recent scandals of farmed salmon being sold as wild in New York City at inflated prices suggest most palates cannot distinguish otherwise.

The paradox to salmon farming is that it may possibly be the solution to preserving wild salmon stocks. If done incorrectly, though, it may cause the collapse of wild salmon stocks worldwide. Grader believes it is possible for farmed salmon to successfully co-exist with wild, “but the farmers have to clean up their act.” They must be willing, he says, to take some simple steps that will make both farmed and wild salmon stocks more sustainable.