Commercial fishing on San Mateo County coast is sinking fast
By: Katie Worth
Examiner Staff Writer
April 2, 2009
 |
| Making it through: Steve Fitz, left, mainly fishes for petrale sole and sand dabs, whose populations are healthy, so he has managed to maintain operations. (Juan Carlos Pometta Betancourt/Special to The Examiner) |
HALF MOON BAY — If you give a fisherman a million bucks, the old joke goes, he’ll keep fishing until it’s all gone.
That kind of gallows humor rings a little too true to generate many laughs these days in Pillar Point Harbor, where a once-thriving fishing community has dwindled to an aging group of only the most devoted fishermen — and many of those are relying on savings to sustain till the next good year.
To hear people like Harbor Master Dan Temko tell it, just a few decades ago the Pillar Point Harbor teemed with fishermen who tied their boats to rafts because the berths at the harbor were all full.
Captains looking for crews had their pick of young people eager to stake out territory in the lucrative seaside industry.
“Back then you could get a job as a deckhand, and if you saved you could work your way into owning a boat,” Temko said.
Fisherman Roger Salisbury entered the business in the 1970s fresh out of school, working as a deckhand and sleeping in his car until he saved up enough to buy a boat and equipment.
“You could never dream of doing that today,” he said. “It’d cost too much.”
With a handful of exceptions, there are few young people coming into the fishing industry at Pillar Point, and more people, of all ages, leaving the business, Temko said.
Longtime fisherman Don Pemberton said he doesn’t blame them, adding that he would not try to convince a young person to go into fishing as a living.
“I went through a lot of agony trying to make this business work for me, and there’s no way I would recommend it to my son. It’s not secure at all,” Pemberton said.
But there’s a loss that comes when young people no longer turn to fishing as a vocation, Temko said. He stopped short of saying the fishing community on San Mateo’s coast is dying, but said it’s definitely changing.
“I think it’s a loss to our society, to our culture, because the fishing world is like a little bit of the Wild Wild West — these are guys you don’t find in the corporate world,” he said. “You have characters, individuality, adventure stories. You can strike it big in fishing, or at least you used to be able to. Now that might be lost.”
“But,” Temko said with a shrug, “the world evolves.”
As it stands, Pillar Point Harbor’s berths are at about 89 percent occupancy, at a time when it’s typically full with a lengthy waiting list, Temko said. The 100 or so salmon and crab boats that were berthed in the harbor just a few years ago have dwindled to about 30, and those belong to the most versatile, intractable fishermen, most of whom have been at it for decades, he said.
There are, however, a handful of young people who have entered the industry despite the obstacles.
Chad Dahlberg, 27, is one of those exceptions. His grandfather taught him to fish, and as a 16-year-old he started working on recreational boats. He now owns his own boat and gear, but even at his young age he’s already talking about the good old days of yore.
“Just five years ago it was busy — during salmon season there were a couple hundred boats here,” Dahlberg said.
Steve Fitz, 40, took over his uncle’s boat when he retired. He mainly fishes petrale sole and sand dabs, whose populations are healthy, so Fitz has not been directly affected by the shutdown of the salmon fishery.
Nonetheless, he said, he sees the future of fishing in San Mateo County’s coastal communities as “extremely bleak.”
Although he comes from a family of fishermen, the young people in his family are now actively discouraged from the trade.
He himself says the glory days of fishing seem to be over, what with the regulations requiring every catch to be documented and huge patches of ocean to be avoided in the interest of conservation.
“There’s just not a lot of incentive for young guys to get into it. There’s not a lot of freedom in it anymore, which is one of the reasons we all get into it,” he said.
Combination of factors affects fishing industry
It’s easy to point out that the fishing industry is declining, but it’s tough to point to any one cause.
Ask the remaining fishermen at Pillar Point Harbor what’s to blame for the decline and they will likely point to one of three things: the exorbitant cost of starting out in the industry; increasing regulations; and the recent nosedive of both the salmon and crab fisheries — two catches that have long put bread on the table of most of Pillar Point’s fishermen.
Longtime fisherman Don Pemberton estimated that it would cost at least $500,000 just to buy a boat, permits and equipment, whereas it was probably about $30,000 when he entered the business in the 1970s.
Fishing costs have been on the rise, but the available catch has decreased. During the past several decades, fishing off California’s coast has become increasingly controlled for conservation; whole swaths of the ocean are now restricted zones.
Meanwhile, fishing permits have become limited in supply and in some cases more than $100,000 to purchase.
While this has had some positive results on many fish populations, it has not helped prevent the catastrophic decline of California’s salmon population.
In 2008, the chinook salmon count in the Sacramento River was less than one-tenth what it was just six years before, which forced an unprecedented ban on salmon fishing in California and southern Oregon.
Today, the federal Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet in Millbrae to decide whether to extend that ban through this year.
The fishing industry is not blamed for this fall. A report issued last month pointed the finger at a combination of poor ocean conditions and the degradation of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Nonetheless, the industry will be hit hard by the decline.
A report by the fishery council estimated that commercial and sport salmon fishing in coastal communities south of Point Arena — which includes Half Moon Bay — brought in an average of more than $27 million a year between 2001 and 2005; last year, the figure was zero.
A congressionally approved federal relief fund has helped shore up the fishermen’s incomes, but in the meantime, they’ve taken another financial hit. Dungeness crab — the other major catch that much of San Mateo County’s fishing industry has typically relied on — has also been in sharp decline for the past two years.
Last year, the California Department of Fish and Game reported the Bay Area’s crab catch had dropped 40 percent from the year before; the numbers are not final for this year, but the clear consensus of the fishermen at Pillar Point is this year is worse than last year.
The general consensus at Pillar Point is hopeful about the crab catch. It tends to ebb and flow in multiyear cycles, and will come back eventually. There are also other types of fish — including rockfish, black cod and sand dabs — that the more versatile fishermen with multiple permits are catching to support themselves.
Decline of an industry
Sacramento River fall-run chinook salmon make up the bulk of the salmon caught in the river system and off California’s coast.
122,000 to 180,000
Minimum number of salmon returning to spawn in the rivers needed to provide eggs for hatcheries, spawning in rivers, and ocean and river salmon seasons
66,286
Number of returning salmon in 2008
87,881
Number of returning salmon in 2007
Source: California Department of Fish and Game
kworth@sfexaminer.com
