The One That Got Away

Published in the East Bay Express - February 8, 1985 - Volume 7, Number 17

All around the Bay Area, signs of its glory remain. But behind the gaudy facades of Jack London Square and Fisherman's Wharf is the sad reality that the Bay Area's once proud and lucrative fishing industry is virtually dead.

      "Here, take a look. I want you to see this." Gary Moscato edged his truck over to the side of the old dirt road that splits off from Highway 17 in Richmond just before the Richmond bridge toll station. I couldn't see much to look at. Between the old road and the blue expanse of San Pablo Bay, there was only the rubble-strewn foundation of an old building. But Moscato insisted. "This, right here, was a huge cannery at one time; this was <the> place where they processed the Pacific blue sardine. When I first started fishing here, this was all canneries, a whole row of giant buildings." His sweeping hand took in the tired, red wooden buildings on each side of the rubble. "Millions of tons of fish were brought into this area. They would come in through the Golden Gate; the ships would be loaded, loaded to the max! Day in and day out, while the season was open, they would roll in here and offload onto these big chain conveyers. Fish were coming and going, coming and going. This at one time was a whole community. Nothing but fishermen . . ."

      It was strange to imagine, sitting on this deserted cliff overhanging the Bay, with only the quiet hills and the water moving slowly by. But the foundations and Moscato's vivid memory did tell a story.

      The sardine boom of 1934 to 1946 was the high point of most living local professional fishermen's lives. At its Bay Area height, in 1939, 491 million pounds of sardines were hauled into Bay ports, an amount some twenty times bigger than the biggest single fishery now - in fact, ten times more than all current Bay Area fish landings put together. California's sardine industry at its height supported some three hundred vessels and three thousand fishermen. Whole families centered their lives around the ocean, and strong fishing communities had developed.

      I had contacted Gary Moscato, who once owned a fishing vessel and fished for a living and, like so many other one-time Bay Area fishermen, was forced to find another occupation (while never ceasing to dream of being out on the water). I wanted to learn, in these times of great unemployment, what had become of the once-thriving Bay Area fishing industry and why it was possible for only a very few to make a living at fishing in the Bay Area today.

      Because, in actuality, this great boom time that Moscato and others remember was only one of many such episodes in the history of Bay Area fishing. In fact, from its very early days, the Bay Area was a major attraction for fishermen. Ships came from Russia and from around the Horn to hunt the sea otter and the fur seal and the great whales. From immediately after the Gold Rush, fishing was a lively trade. The Italians, the Bay Area's first full-time commercial fishermen, began netting salmon in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and "seining" sardines, herring, and flatfishes (flounder, sole torbot, sand dab, halibut) in San Francisco Bay. The seining technique they used (throwing a big round net over a large area and then drawing it in) and the small lateem-rigged boats that they sailed were direct imports from the Mediterranean fishing villages from which they had come. When a pest ruined the vineyards of the Azore Islands, many Portuguese arrived and joined the trade also.

      The Chinese were the other dominant fishing people of the Bay Area, and got into the trade very soon after their arrival. Using their own native junks, they started fishing for sturgeon. By 1864 they were beach seining for salmon; and by 1871 they had pretty well taken over the shrimp fields in the central parts of San Francisco Bay. Chinese shrimp camps were located at Hunter's Point, Point San Bruno, and Point San Mateo in South San Francisco, at Point San Pedro near San Rafael (this site is now in China Camp State Park), and, in the East Bay, at Point San Pablo, the site I visited in Richmond. The camps were made up of long, unpainted, redwood cabins on stilts over the beaches or the water. Redwood is rot-resistant and, after being weathered by the salt air, also fire retardant. (You can still see the influence of these camps in the stick houses on stilts recreated in copper by Monterey craftsmen.) Racks of drying shrimp filled these camps that were home to one thousand to (in season) four thousand Chinese, and it is estimated that some five million pounds a year of dried shrimp were exported by boat back to the Chinese mainland. For shrimping, the Chinese introduced the Chinese bag net, which was later - after the Chinese were forced out of the fishery - redesigned by a fisherman named Spenger for trawling (bottom-fishing done by dragging an open-ended net sack along). Between the Bay shrimp and the Dungeness crab, the Chinese were involved in two of the most famous of the Bay Area's fisheries.

      Not only was the Bay teeming with fish, but it was thought to be an ideal environment into which to introduce otheer marine species. No sooner was the transcontinental railroad finished than oysters were brought in from the Atlantic Coast, then the softshell clam, and in the 1870s shad, carp, catfish, and striped bass. Some of these - the oyster and the striped bass - became major catches.

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      Perhaps the most romantic period for fishermen in the Bay Area was during the 1880s and 1890s, a time that is still celebrated in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf and Oakland's Jack London Village, in the writings of Jack London, and in the seafood restaurants of the Aliotos, the Castagnolas, and the Spengers. By 1880, San Francisco was the biggest fishing port on the Pacific Coast. There were some three to four thousand fishermen working full or part-time year-round. There was some kind of catch for every month in the year. Smelt fishing, for example, went on on in southern San Francisco Bay from January to June, between Point San Bruno and Point San Mateo (now mostly filled) in April, in Berkeley waters in May, and off South San Francisco in July and August. Smelt as well as herring could be caught in Oakland waters from November to February. Salmon fishing took place off Berkeley and Oakland from April to July - as the salmon swam up to spawn in the many swollen creeks flowing into the Bay - and in San Pablo Bay from April to September. Flounder and sturgeon were caught from February to May off Sonoma Creek in north San Pablo Bay and off Richmond and Pinole from April to September. Native oysters could be found in pockets along much of San Francisco Bay's coastline, and clam beds were harvested along the shore off San Pablo, Richmond, Albany, in southern San Francisco Bay, and in San Pablo Bay. This was also the period when Fisherman's Wharf was built in San Francisco (1994); the first fishermen's union on the Pacific Coast (the Fishermen's Protective and Benevolent Association) was going strong; and twenty-six Chinese shrimp camps circled the Bay (1897).

      But it didn't last long. By 1910 only nineteen shrimp camps were left. The oyster industry - which brought in some fifteen million pounds a year through the 1890s - began to decline after 1900. The sturgeon fishery was closed in 1917. By then, the Taylor Street Wharf fish markets in San Francisco had begun to supplement their earnings by serving fish cocktails and fried fish (and later cioppino). Licensing of commercial fishermen and of wholesale dealers was instituted. Imports of raw tuna from Japan began in the 1920s. The big ocean-going trawlers that fished the Pacific Coast began to move their headquarters to Eureka. Before 1900, ninety percent of California's fishermen were employed in the San Francisco Bay Area These days, Eureka is where fishermen head.

      So when the sardine boom occurred in the 1930s and '40s, it was a welcome revival after years of decline. During those same years, some of the shrimp camps at Point San Pablo were rebuilt and modernized. In 1938, San Francisco had some two thousand consumer outlets for fresh fish and four large distributors. In fact, during World War II, a whole row of "clam bars" could be found between the Cow Palace and old Bayshore Boulevard, which ran along the SP tracks in southern San Francisco, where one could fill up on beer and as many clams as you could eat for a dollar. But the boom also didn't last too long. After ten years of incredibly intense fishing, the sardines too began to disappear, and the 21 canneries at Point San Pablo in Richmond (along with the better known ones of Monterey's Cannery Row) closed almost overnight.

      Unfortunately, that wasn't as low as things could sink. At the same time that the sardine industry died, cases of clam poisoning began to be reported in increasing number, the pollution building up in the Bay decreased the fishery, and the clam bars too were shut down. Between 1940 and 1970 there had also been a sixty percent decline in the salmon catches, and an eighty percent decline in the landings of steelhead. In the 1970s, the whaling industry was closed down (for once, <before> the resource was completely devastated). By 1935 even the striped bass, one of the newcomers which bred so well in its Bay home, was no longer allowed as a legal commercial fish.

      You can read the history of the decline on the same hillside in Richmond where the sardine canneries once stood. Right next to their ruins, a big blue wooden building, which was the very last active whaling station in the U. S., the Del Monte Fishing Company - "Independent Renderers, Inc." the sign reads - was closed in 1972. The platform on which the whales were hauled up is still visible, though the smell is gone. And next to it is the rubble left from the old Chinese shrimp camp that stood on the shores.

      "Somehow I knew," Gary Moscato said quietly, "don't ask me how, that one day these buildings weren't going to be here. And I came out here and took photos of them. My wife said, 'Gary, what are you taking pictures of those old buildings for?' But I'm glad that I did."

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      Ironically, there is a new commercial fishing industry in the Bay Area, an industry made up of entrepreneurs who have recently started flying in fresh fish from Alaska, New England, and parts of the globe even farther away to be sold to the many fish-eateries that we still expect and want to have as a part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Here we sit, on the most extensive of the West Coast's inland water bodies, on a river system which once boasted five different species of Pacific salmon, and we are unable to feed ourselves from our own local resources. As an under-employed Bay Arean, and also as an active member of the East Bay's Urban Creeks Task Force, I got curious enough to ask some questions about how this could be.

      So one afternoon at the Berkeley Bowl last spring, I got fish salesman Peter Tamano to give me a tour of the seafood on sale. I wanted to find out if any of his bountiful display was from our own water. As it turned out, there were Idaho trout, Canadian (or Washington) coho (silver) salmon, Washington sturgeon, mussels from Maine farms (though larger ones are also brought in from New Zealand farms), clams from the East coast, the Philippines and Washington, shrimp (frozen) from South America, Mexico, and from Norway, scallops (frozen) from Australia and Japan (sometimes fresh scallops from Florida are available), and catfish and buffalo fish from Louisiana fish farms. Shark and swordfish are shipped from San Diego, mackerel from Southern California, Alaska, and Canada, prawns and squid from Monterey, Dungeness crab from Washington and Eureka, and Rex and English sole from the north coast (usually off Point Arena). But the only fish for sale that are still caught locally were the rockfish (rock cods, like red snapper), "kingfish" (Tommy croaker or white croaker), lingcod, salt water perches, halibut, butterfish/sablefish, flounder, sole, and shark. Except for shark (of which there may be more in the Bay then anything else), there are mostly ocean bottom-feeders, mainly caught by the monstrous company ships which work the coastal water, able to follow the large schools of fish with expensive sonar and other high-tech electronic tracking systems, and unloading at whatever port is most convenient.

      Yes, but, you might say, sports fishermen can still go out and bring home a catch to feed themselves and, with luck, some friends or neighbors. But nowadays, even for sport fishermen, a forty pound bass is a rarity and two legal-size fish are a good day's catch. Much sports fishing is done in especially stocked reservoirs like Lake Temescal and the San Pablo Reservoir.

      Even the "New York Times" travel section warns that San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf is a well-disguised ghost town, a Knotts Berry Farm-of-the-Sea. Fishing long ago gave way as a major employment to long-shoring, and tourist industries like hotels and restaurants are the biggest livelihoods on the wharf. Tourists still come to soak in the San Francisco fishing tradition, but it is said that some eighty percent of the fish they're fed are imported.

      Yet at the same time, U. S. fish consumption is rising (ten percent from 1970 to 1982) as people become conscious of the health benefits of lowering their saturated fat intake (the consumption of beef, pork, veal, and lamb has shown a corresponding decline). More people would like to eat fish, yet there isn't enough to go around.

      Even with the scarcity of fish, a few individuals still try to make a living out of fishing in the Bay Area. Although really accurate counts are not kept of the area's active commercial fishermen, I tried to get an unofficial rough count. Maybe twelve to fifteen gill-netting boats dock in the Berkeley Marina; seven part-time and two full-time commercial fishing boats are kept at Point San Pablo in Richmond; some thirty year-round full-time fishermen dock their boats along the Oakland Estuary, while some 150 boats from other ports unload their catches at Oakland in certain seasons. Of course, San Francisco is still a major port, but even that port harbors maybe 150 boats at most. (Sausalito, Princeton, and Bodega may also be popular home bases, but I was unable to obtain estimates for them).

      Gary Moscato's situation is probably typical of many would-be fishermen. He used to be what was called a "day tripper," going out on weekends and holidays. In the 1970s it was still not much trouble to keep a boat for such infrequent use. In his little 30-foot Monterey, he would go seven to eight miles out of Port Bonita (on the Marin side of the Golden Gate) and fish with hand lines. If she caught nothing else, he could make the trip worthwhile by picking up and selling bait fish. Gary bought his boat for about $2000 in the mid-'70s, found some used radio gear for around #250, and took his wife or kids out to help him. But in a short ten years, the situation has dramatically changed. The fish to make a trip profitable are now mostly found from 50 to 175 miles off the coast, so far out that much bigger boats are necessary - and they can cost more like $160,000 to $200,000. To make ends meet, "long lines" (long fishing lines with many hooks set on the ocean bottom) are often used, so more helpers are needed. Gas is, of course, many times more expensive then in the past. Radio gear can easily run over $1000. Insurance is in no way a negligible cost. And now the commercial license runs $125 per boat, plus $40 for the skipper, plus $40 for each "puller" that the skipper takes along to help. Added up, this means that only big, capital-intensive boats can go where the fish are today.

      The children and grandchildren of the early successful Bay Area fishing families have not followed their parents into fishing. If they are at all involved in it, it is as the owners of the distribution warehouses, the packers, the canneries. Gary Moscato now works at a plant manager at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill. Only a few of his former fishing buddies still manage to keep up the old way of life. Of these, some have become bait fishermen to supply the bigger ships; some just go out during specific seasons; many use their boats as "party boats," taking sports fishermen out for a day's jaunt.

      There is one "boom" going on. Each winter, boats from all up and down the coast descend on San Francisco Bay for the herring catch, and many locals hire on to help with the catch in what would otherwise be the slowest season. Since 1972, when the Japanese lifted their prohibitions on imported herring roe, the dollar was devalued, and the Japanese herring industry collapsed (some say from overfishing), millions of dollars worth of herring roe have been exported from the Bay Area each year. But once again, the fishery is precarious: this year's catch was showing signs of decline.

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      What has caused the Bay Area's decline as a major fishing port? Ask this question and you're likely to get a pretty lively argument going. El Nino and the Russian fishing boats off the coat are frequently blamed. Everybody has his pet theory. So, I tried to listen to all of the opinions, and read several studies (California Department of Fish and Game's, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission's, Association of Bay Area Government's, Regional Water Quality Control Board's). These are their answers, along with those from the landmark study, "An Environmental Tragedy," put together by a citizen's advisory group to the Department of Fish and Game in 1972:

      Overfishing is a factor. When you have intensive fishing for fish-life low on the food chain, after awhile the fish higher up have got to start suffering. The massive shrimp fishery of the end of the last century must have had some side-effects. The 1930s and '40s sardine boom must have also. The current herring bonanza must too . . . and this is especially saddening when you realize that only the herring's roe goes directly for human consumption. The rest of the fish is used for fertilizer. The sardines too were mostly fed to livestock and poultry.

      On the other hand, Bay pollution is the major problem preventing a shellfish fishery. It is said that the mussels and oysters and clams still grow out there, some think in as huge a number as ever, but that the pollutants they collect from sewage plant discharges (both treated and untreated), urban runoff, and other sources, such as lagoons and golf courses, make them unsafe to harvest. Meanwhile, since they are not seen as a valuable resource, their tideland beds have been gradually filled in to create new real estate. The filling was halted in 1965 (after one-third of the Bay was already gone), but whether the Bay can ever be cleaned up enough to make Bay shellfish safe for harvesting is still an open question.

      The filling-in of habitats also affected the Bay's shrimp, which move into shallow water flats with the incoming tide. Even in 1956, three hundred people were employed in shrimp fishing. Now Bay shrimp are caught only for bait. (Freshwater shrimp, still found in Lagunitas Creek in Marin, Huichica Creek in Napa, and East Austin, Salmon, and Sonoma Creeks in Sonoma, are on the endangered species list. They were never commercially fished, however.)

      When it comes to the "anadrmous" fish - salmon, trout, and sturgeon - which leave the salt water, pass through the Bay's brackish waters, and swim upstream to fresh water to spawn in the riffle-and-pool habitats of our once-sparkling cool inland streams - man-made dams and other obstructions are a major problem. Look at a map: just about every single creek or river feeding into the San Francisco Bay Delta has a dam on it. Six thousand miles of rivers and creeks once suitable for spawning have been reduced to three hundred miles. Although in some cases fish ladders now help the spawning fish climb upstream, those that get there fin very few treeshaded riffle-and-pool habitats remaining. They may spawn, but few of the young will survive without these environments. And even fewer of the "fry" will be able to get downstream to the ocean past the hydro-electric dams' whirling turbines.

      Loggers and gold-miners started the destruction of anadromous fish habitats, and the power companies have pretty nearly completed it. Rampant creek culverting since the 1930s has made the destruction even harder to reverse. Under pressure, hatcheries have been set up as "mitigation" for the loss of naturally-bred fish, with young fry even being trucked downstream past he worst obstacles, but this has not produced anywhere near the amount of fish destroyed by inland waterway modification.

      Dungeness Crab have the reverse pattern from the anadrmous fish, but are doing no better. They spawn in the Gulf of the Farallons during December and January; many of the juvenile crabs are swept through the Golden Gate and distributed around the Bay by estuarine currents. After a year in the Bay, the young adults swim or as pushed back into the ocean by currents. The crab catch has dropped off from an average of five million pounds in the 1950s to under half a million pounds a year in the 1970s and 1980s. Selemium and other toxicants entering the Bay-Delta system may be part of the cause. Studies are still going on.

      My conclusion: Environmentalism is popularly thought of as being uneconomical, but where the fate of the fishing industry is concerned, what's good for nature is good for business.

      The Bay (from the Golden Gate to the Delta) was closed to commercial fishing with gill or trammel nets in 1957. The fishermen I talked to said it was for the wrong reasons: the shipping companies wanted all those little fishing boats to stop cluttering up their shipping lanes. But the more I researched and asked about this subject, the more I came to feel that indeed the Bay should continue to be especially restricted. BCDC's 1966 Preliminary Fish and Wildlife Plan for San Francisco Bay-Estuary in fact reported that against all odds, the Bay was the dominant fish nursery for the whole West Coast. Salmon raised in the Bay are caught from San Luis Obispo county to the south all the way north to Vancouver, Canada. About seventy percent of the king salmon landed in California are from our very own Sacramento-San Joaquin River system. The young of many species are found here - not only of trout and salmon but of striped bass, sturgeon, shad, Pacific herring, jacksmelt, topsmelt, starry flounders, and English sole.

      So what lies ahead? Perhaps a change of attitude. East Bay groups who are working on the design for the Berkeley waterfront frequently propose the idea of a fishing pier and fish market. It seems people are strongly attracted to places that have the activities and ambience of a working fish harbor and waterfront. It's an unbeatable equation: Fish equals food plus livelihood plus atmosphere plus tourists. But fishing has been seen up until now as an expendable industry - "When the fish are there, they're there, and when they're not, we'll just find them somewhere else." This simply must change. To enable fishing to become once again a viable industry, we need to encourage <sustainable> fisheries. And then perhaps the filet of king salmon poached in white wine and served with a sauce of cream, shallots, and oyster mushrooms, the freshly-caught trout marinated in red wine, olive oil, onions, mint, rosemary, thyme, bay leaf, peppercorns, and salt, then wrapped in bacon slices and sauteed, and pungent-smelling hot gumbo with Bay shrimp, crabs, and oysters all may again be prepared from the bounty of our Bay.