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Later, at the city harbor department office, business manager Sue Lichtenbaum recalled: “In the ’70s, when I worked for Bob’s Seafood, 90 percent of the fish were local. You had to tell a customer when they weren’t.” Now few of the fish coming into the harbor are sold here. Squid caught by Morro Bay fishermen go to China for processing, albacore might go to American Samoa for canning. As for the local pismo clams, what was left of them disappeared in the late 1980s, along with abalone, when the sea otters began to recover and feast on their favorite foods. Until then, said harbor director Rick Algert, many restaurants served local clam chowder.

Did the Millers know that, I wondered, and if they didn’t, would they have been disappointed if they’d found out? The next morning, I would hear Mayor Janice Peters tell the Coastal Conservancy, which was meeting in her town: “Morro Bay is primarily supported by the tourist industry, and the beloved and beleaguered fishing industry is part of what brings the tourists here.”

Struggling to Survive

Commercial fishing is “beleaguered” all along the coast, but its decline is especially hard on small towns that rely heavily on it. With prices for fuel and materials rising, gillnetting banned within three miles of the shore, severe restrictions on groundfish fisheries, and the burden of having to navigate a maze of regulations, many fishermen are finding that the cost of operation is too high for what they can earn. In Morro Bay, the industry has dwindled so much it no longer supports the storage, processing, and repair facilities the harbor used to provide.

Last August Algert wrote to State Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman: “If we let fishing businesses die or become any more economically unviable they will be supplanted by visitor serving uses, our harbor infrastructures will be lessened, and these unique parts of California life will be history.”

Not that the community hasn’t been trying to keep the industry alive. Fishermen’s slip rents are kept low. The harbor department subsidizes them with lease income from other properties it holds on the tourist-oriented part of the waterfront. In 2004, when Driscoll’s Wharf Seafood, Inc., operator of the city-owned wharf, went out of business, the city

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