Don Marshall, a leader of the young generation of Pillar Point fishermen, was working Wednesday on the hydraulic system of a boat he bought for $50,000 in July, a purchase he now regrets. He offered a visitor his left hand, protecting his right, which he broke this summer while salmon trolling. Instead of resting to let the break heal, Marshall kept fishing. He needed the money.

But even this year’s commercial chinook salmon season was poor — largely because California’s historic drought has lowered water levels in the rivers where the fish spawn and hatch. Preliminary figures from Fish and Wildlife show just 114,000 salmon were caught in California, down roughly 25 percent from 2014. And the fish were small at an average of 10.5 pounds, about 3 pounds lighter than the average over the past five years, according to Jennifer Simon, one of the agency’s environmental scientists.

The lackluster salmon fishing will exacerbate the financial toll of the crab closure. And the crab season may not be so great once it opens. Fishermen will likely contend with El Niño storms and prices that are undercut by a lack of holiday demand.

“It’s probably going to be the hardest winter we’ve ever seen,” said Marshall, who at 33 is president of the California Small Boat Trollers Association.

Results from the most recent round of tests, conducted around the end of October, show domoic acid levels were much higher in Humboldt and Del Norte counties than along the Central Coast, an encouraging sign for fishermen in San Francisco, Half Moon Bay, Moss Landing and Monterey.

But a 1997 laboratory study suggested it takes three weeks or more from the point crabs are exposed to domoic acid for the chemical to leave their systems. Many crabs off the California coast are likely still eating snails and other food sources that are contaminated.

Domoic acid is always present in the food web, but at safe amounts, scientists say. This year’s extraordinary levels of the biotoxin were caused by an unusually vast and persistent algal bloom, which was bolstered by record-breaking high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

Harmful algal blooms are on the rise around the globe, a phenomenon that could be linked to climate change, said Raphael Kudela, a phytoplankton ecologist at UC Santa Cruz.

Water samples show this year’s bloom has died off along the California coast, though it may still lurk farther out to sea, Kudela said. And the outlook for 2016 is poor.

“We don’t have a crystal ball,” said Kudela, “but our best guess is next year we’ll see another toxic bloom, and it may be as big as this year’s.”

And, while it’s too early to say for sure, the 2016 salmon season may not be so great, either.

“We’re not anticipating a high abundance of fish available for harvest,” said Simon, of Fish and Wildlife.

Despite the gloom, fishermen at Pillar Point are confident in their ability to roll with Mother Nature’s punches. Those jabs and hooks may come in faster, less predictable combinations as the climate grows hotter.

Breton, who began working as a deckhand when he was 16, has no plans to stop fishing.

“This is kind of what I was raised into,” Breton said, “so I don’t see myself doing anything else. You adapt.”

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