The wild and crazy salmon-fueled days of summer on the Kenai Peninsula were just starting in the twin cities of Kenai and Soldotna this week when the bad news landed like a bomb: The Alaska Department of Fish and Game was ordering an emergency closure of king salmon fishing on the fabled Kenai River through the rest of June and into July.

Word of the shutdown of the multimillion-dollar fishery spread quickly and painfully through the salmon-focused buzz of tourist businesses, fast-food restaurants and shopping centers already forewarned that the summer return of sockeye salmon would likely be weak.

Longtime Kenai fishing guide Mike Fenton said at first he didn't believe the latest news. He thought someone had gotten confused. He figured the fabled king salmon fishery staged on the fast waters of the big turquoise-colored river was merely being restricted to catch and release. The state has done that with regularity in the past to protect weak returns of the largest of all Pacific salmon while still allowing tourist businesses dependent on salmon fishing the chance to put their clients on the water.

Not this year, though. This year the state agency in charge of monitoring king salmon catches decided the salmon return was so weak all fishing had to be stopped immediately.

"I was just shocked," Fenton said. "I'm pretty upset about it."

Years ago, the state wrote a Kenai king salmon management plan that stipulated step-down closures to protect fishing-dependent businesses like those belonging to Fenton and about 400 other state-licensed guides. The first step was to limit anglers to keeping only the rare trophy king -- a chinook over 50 inches long. The second step was to order catch-and-release-only fishing -- an activity a state study concluded would be expected to cause the deaths of less than one in every 10 king salmon brought to a boat. The last step was to close the fishery entirely.

The state has always followed that plan in the past, but this year jumped without warning to a full-scale closure. Biologists who met to discuss sonar counter numbers showing fewer than 800 fish in the river -- when there should have been about four times that -- decided the situation was so dire they had no choice, said Sport Fisheries Division regional supervisor Jim Hasbrouck.

"Our projections show the run in pretty rough shape," he said.

Nearly everyone involved in Kenai fisheries has known that for weeks.

The fishing has bad since May, and the sonar numbers are available on the Internet. They've shown the king return lagging since the start.

But no one was expecting Fish and Game to make its first management step the most drastic one.

---

"For a total closure like this, it's never happened," said Dohn Cho, general manager of Kenai Riverbend Resort. "They totally caught us off guard. The first calls yesterday, it was like a bomb going off."

Former state sport fisheries director Kevin Delaney, who has been doing some consulting for the Kenai River Sportfishing Association, said he still can't understand how the decision was made. There was, he said, no downside to going to catch-and-release at least through the weekend while warning fishing businesses that more closures could be coming after further sonar counts were analyzed.

At most, Delaney said, a weekend of catch-and-release fishing would have resulted in the deaths of 8 or 10 fish. That is a statistically insignificant number. It is so small, he noted, that it falls within the range of seasonal error for the fish-counting sonar. But keeping fishing going for a few more days, no matter how few, would have done a lot for Peninsula businesses.