Fishing Industry

The fishing isn't as good as it used to be for the commercial fishermen working the waters off Southern California. Their landings of squid are barely more than a quarter of what they were in 2000. Seasonal quotas on other seafood are so low that they can be reached in as little as a week. Still, the most problematic catch for what's left of a once-flourishing fleet is sometimes encountered on land. The fishermen's hauls -- mainly squid, sardines and mackerel -- are bound for Asia.

Government fishery managers took steps Friday toward an unprecedented total ban on salmon fishing this year off the California and Oregon coasts, a move that would hammer beleaguered harbors and deprive the West of a culinary and cultural prize. A ban would cut deeply into a $150-million industry already suffering hard times, hitting not just commercial fishing but also the state's recreational angling industry.

Instead of preparing to hit the Pacific's wind-tossed waters next month, veteran fisherman Dave Bitts sat at the counter of a dockside restaurant on Humboldt Bay recently, mulling fate and a cloudy future. For the first time since the birth of the West Coast fishing industry 150 years ago, Bitts and other fishermen face a season without salmon.

You probably know the proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." There are few fish, or at least few salmon, to give a man this year with the collapse of the California salmon fishery; the number of chinook returning to spawn in the Sacramento River has dwindled to about a 10th of the run a few years ago. The response from state representatives shows they aren't as versed in ancient Chinese wisdom as we'd like.

Shigeru Honma had not been to Tokyo in more than 30 years. But on July 1, the 58-year-old fisherman from this port city in northern Japan dusted off an old suit and traveled to the capital to deliver a letter to the prime minister. Soaring fuel prices are killing Japan's fishing industry, it said. Give us money, or oil. There's been no response from the prime minister's office, so fishery cooperatives have organized a nationwide strike today with 200,000 vessels halting operations.

On the eve of October's peak seafood harvesting season, migrant fishermen are sweeping debris from gutted bay-side homes instead of scooping shrimp and oysters from the Gulf of Mexico's lucrative floor. The $100-million fishing industry in Galveston Bay is nearly paralyzed. Hurricane Ike's effect is being felt among gulf seafood harvesters, distributors and restaurants.

Some days, fisherman Aoun Saleh loves life on the seas: the friendships, the jokes, the singing, especially when they have a big catch. But some days he rues the day he first walked onto the docks. Like the time, he says, the Kuwaiti sailors stopped his boat in midwinter and forced the entire crew to swim in the cold waters. Or when the Iranian coast guard held him and other fishermen captive, forcing them to cook and clean for them.

A little less than 20 years ago, Mike Webber was king of his own watery world. He was 28 years old, with three herring fishing boats. He leased another long-line boat for halibut, and gill-netted the fat salmon that made Prince William Sound one of the most legendary fisheries in the world. Then came the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Overnight, it was all gone: Fish prices plummeted. People started selling their fishing permits to pay their mortgages, and then lost their houses anyway.

An unusually weak Dungeness crab harvest is compounding the financial woes of West Coast fishermen who were already struggling with depressed consumer demand and the unprecedented collapse of the Pacific chinook salmon fishery. Commercial fishermen in California, Oregon and Washington are struggling to stay afloat financially. They say the downturn could force fishermen who depend heavily on crab and salmon to leave the shrinking ranks of the region's fishing fleet.

Like nearly every other West Coast fisherman's wife, Ronnie Pellegrini fretted as a near-shutdown of last year's salmon season hammered California's commercial fleet. Enough is enough, she decided one day. So she turned on the computer in her Eureka home -- and turned to EBay.