News that Fish and Game has closed fishing for kings in nearly every accessible river and stream west of Wal-Mart is worse than bad news for the local tourism economy. It’s not hard to hear motorhomes rumbling and rental cars cruising south to the Kenai where visitors can still catch a king. And a couple of halibut.

It’s also not hard to hear what they will tell their family, friends and neighbors when they get back home.

“It’s pretty too look at, but if y’all want to catch a big fish, don’t go to the Mat-Su Valley.” It’s bad enough that the Deshka has been closed the last couple of years, but guides could take clients to the Su Drainage and scrounge around for some chinook holes. Now they can’t do that, so they’re out of luck for this season and so are their customers.

Obviously, something isn’t right.

Why are the fish not returning in sufficient numbers? Is predation at sea that much worse? Are they running into environmental aberrations that are cutting their numbers?

Or are they being overfished before they get a chance to come home and spawn?

Scientists blame a lot of occurrences on global warming, but the gut here in the Valley tells us this a man-made problem of the fishing net kind.

There have been too many tales about crew members watching trawlers hunting for one fish, catching kings by the hundreds and tossing them — dead — overboard.

That’s why American pollock ships should have observers on them 100 percent of the fishing period. Not so long ago, observers were only on ships 30 percent of the time. So who knows how many salmon were caught in pollock nets?

The bycatch cap could be 60,000 king salmon in 2011 before the pollock fleet has to pull up its nets.

At least that’s what a proposed amendment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recommended in June of this year.

That’s 60,000 fish gone to Alaska rivers and streams above what are caught by smaller commercial fishermen and setnet sites.

And that’s above the amount caught in Russian and Japanese trawler nets where there are no American observers on board to monitor the bycatch on those ships.

Is it any wonder why fish returning here should be in the thousands are coming home by the hundreds? Or even dozens.

Valley residents who like having a few extra dollars coming in from tourism, or their fair share of kings in the freezer, should be all over this issue.