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Though ocean trolling began in the early 1900's, most commercial salmon fishing in California was once done with gillnets in the rivers. With statutory closing of the last such fishery in 1957, ocean trolling became the only way of commercially landing salmon in California. In recent years, mooching (drifting with rod-and-reel gear) has also become popular. With either method, California commercial salmon fishermen work from relatively small, ocean-going boats equipped with what amounts to numerous heavy-duty barbless hook-and-line fishing rigs. This technique produces high-quality fresh salmon available to market from May through September. Most salmon trolling vessels are owned by their operators, who work alone or with one deckhand. Many of the top producing boats are fished by husband-and-wife teams.

Salmon trolling became more than just an industry. A unique subculture, dependent on the annual foraging movements of California salmon along the Pacific coast, developed in small coastal communities. Some fishermen acquired larger boats capable of following salmon at sea as they migrate along the coast, while others followed the fish by trailering their small boats from port to port. As the salmon troll fishery grew, the economies of coastal ports along California's coast from Morro Bay to Crescent City developed an infrastructure and support industry based on salmon landings. It has been estimated that by 1980, as many as 50,000 California jobs were based on recreational and commercial salmon fisheries.

As habitat loss drove salmon stocks into decline, state and federal fishery managers used the powers granted them under the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, which created the PFMC, to recommend ever more restrictive fishing seasons and quotas on the fishery. It would be a decade before federal fisheries managers would acknowledge that habitat loss, not over-fishing, was causing salmon runs to decline.

After a series of increasingly restricted seasons, in 1985, the North Coast from Shelter Cove to Crescent City was closed to commercial salmon fishing. Since then, that area has had token fishing seasons at best. Following several years of negotiated allocations of harvestable Klamath fall chinook between the Yurok and Hoopa Tribes and nontribal commercial and sports fishermen, the federal government allocated half the harvestable Klamath fish to the tribes in 1993, effectively closing the ocean north of Point Arena to commercial fishing except for token, late-season fisheries. The commercial and sport salmon fishing industries bore, and continue to bear, the brunt of regulatory action imposed in the name of salmon recovery. As the 21st Century begins, it is as yet unclear whether this trend will continue, though signs and actions from state and federal regulatory agencies indicate that it will. The federal listing of coastal fall chinook, for example, has at this writing had minimal effect on land-use practices, but has on one occasion severely restricted ocean fishing opportunity.

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