California commercial fishermen are reporting the biggest king salmon season in a decade, on the heels of three years of disastrously low catches because of the drought. The sudden bounty has resulted in a price drop for the coral-pink, fatty fillets to $20 per pound in many markets, down from the $30- to $35-per-pound range of recent years.

“You might say this is the old normal, because we’ve been so used to catastrophe,” said Noah Oppenheim, executive director at the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. “Consumers who have been facing tough prices because of scarcity of California salmon are seeing a much more accessible product.”

Traditionally a signal of summer in Northern California, the fish will finally be plentiful again in time for Fourth of July barbecue season. While supermarkets like Safeway and Lucky didn’t have fresh local salmon in stock this week, Whole Foods had it on special for $22.99 per pound and Monterey Fish in Berkeley and Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco for $19.99, which a Bi-Rite employee said was its lowest price of the season.

It’s a huge shift for the local salmon fishing fleet after three difficult seasons, which traditionally run from May to October. The seasons were cut short to protect the population of Chinook salmon born in or migrated from the Sacramento River Delta during the 2014-16 drought; the 2016 and 2017 seasons were declared federal disasters for the fishery.

This year’s crop of adult salmon is the first generation to benefit from the heavy rain that filled the river and tributaries in the spring of 2017, speeding their passage to the Pacific Ocean.

A spokesman from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said it’s too early for official numbers of fish landed so far. But John Koeppen, a Santa Cruz commercial fisherman, said that landings in Avila Bay and other southern harbors are approaching historic numbers, and many of those fish are being sold around the Bay Area.

Before the season started, the National Marine Fisheries Service forecast that there would be 380,000 adult salmon along the Bay Area and Central California coastlines this year, compared to 224,000 last year, a number that helped determine the commercial salmon season and quotas. It now seems they may have underestimated, Koeppen said.

“It appears that the abundance is greater than what was projected,” said Koeppen, who helps set the calendar and quotas of West Coast salmon fishing as an adviser to the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

Adding to the success of the season is the fact that the ocean is full of anchovies and other feed right now.

“There are really good bait conditions,” said Sarah Bates, captain of the fishing vessel the Bounty out of San Francisco, who said that San Francisco fleet members observed a mass of salmon several miles long. “It feels like there’s general abundance.”

That abundance caused a drop in the salmon price for fishermen, which prompted several in the fleet to take part in an informal strike for a few days last week. They resumed fishing Monday, Bates said, and have since been scouting fish from Half Moon Bay to Point Reyes. They’ll stop from July 1 to 10, during a mandated break in the season, and then resume later in July.

The limited salmon catch of recent years meant that little local fish was sold outside the Bay Area, said Tom Worthington of Monterey Fish, a wholesaler in San Francisco with the Berkeley retail shop. Because those sales stopped for several years, he said, it’s difficult to resume them quickly when there’s finally a lot of fish to go around.

“Those connections to other (markets) in different states and different cities have all dried up,” he said. “It’s made more fish available locally, which has kind of suppressed the price.”

When a slew of fish hits the market suddenly, it has to be sold quickly, and the short window doesn’t give retailers who aren’t expecting it time to advertise, Worthington added. But he said he was fine with that.

“I want more people to enjoy this local catch of ours instead of it going out of state,” he said. “It’s part of our beautiful bounty.”

Tara Duggan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s assistant food editor. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @taraduggan