Wednesday June 10, 2026
The Mendocino Voice —
Every summer a line of volunteers in masks and wetsuits floats down the South Fork Eel, shoulder to shoulder across the current, counting the one fish almost everyone on the river wants gone.
They are counting Sacramento pikeminnow, and this is the 11th year they’ve done it. The Eel River Recovery Project runs the dive every summer along a 12-mile stretch of the South Fork, from Rattlesnake Creek down to Standish Hickey State Recreation Area — two six-mile reaches, six divers, the whole run knocked out in a day when enough volunteers show up. They count only fish over four inches and sort them by size, and they also log the young salmon and steelhead they pass on the way.
“Like it or not, we’re in charge of evolution, and we will never get rid of them,” said Pat Higgins, who runs the recovery project out of Loleta and has led the count since it started in 2016. “But if we don’t suppress them, we’re going to get more pikeminnow and fewer native fish.”
The pikeminnow is the most reviled animal in the Eel. Someone dumped it into Lake Pillsbury in 1979 — a bait-bucket introduction, illegal — and by 1986, it had spread through the whole basin, its numbers climbing into the millions. A torpedo of a fish, it eats juvenile salmon and steelhead on a river fighting to bring those runs back.