California Coast & Ocean

They were standing on the Embarcadero, outside one of the tourist-oriented shops, as if trying to decide where to go next. They looked so content and friendly, and so obviously weren’t locals, that I was emboldened to ask: “What brought you to Morro Bay?”

“The charm of a small seaside village,” answered Bob Miller, of San Clemente. He and his wife had been driving down the coast and decided to stop in the town. “We came here several times with the children in the ’70s, when we lived in Anaheim,” Celine Miller explained. “We tried to find the place where we had clam chowder—and we did find it.” They had concluded that the town hadn’t changed all that much.

It was early afternoon on a lovely September Wednesday, and the Morro Bay waterfront was pretty quiet. On the Embarcadero, banners at shop doorways stirred in the light breeze. From the boardwalk along the glittering water, a few small boats were visible near Morro Rock, the ancient volcanic plug that is the main local landmark. The Rock is home to two pairs of nesting peregrine falcons, as well as plovers, guillemots, cormorants, and other birds. In the past, stone was quarried from the Rock, using explosives, to build roads and harbors. Now it’s a wildlife reserve.

At the south end of town, a small boy and his mother had Tidelands Park to themselves, with its playful sculptures of sea mammals and a wooden-boat climbing structure. To the north, on the wharf near the three smokestacks of the Duke Energy power plant, a couple of fishermen were putting away their gear.

The Millers had whetted my appetite for clam chowder, so I headed north along the waterfront and soon arrived at the Li’l Hut, where I found chowder on the menu posted beside the take-out window. “The clams are local, right?” I asked. “Nope,” was the response from within. “Well, I’d like something local, so what’s local?” “There’s nothing local. Everything’s from somewhere else,” answered the manager, Tammy Jones. The Li’l Hut is only steps away from the wharf where fishing boats come in with their catch. “Everything’s from somewhere else?” “That’s right.”

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 helped the Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Organization take on the lease and, with funding from the Coastal Conservancy, improved the wharf. In 1984, to prevent tourist businesses from pricing fishermen out of the working waterfront, citizens passed Measure D, a voter initiative that rezoned the northern waterfront for waterfront-dependent uses. (Existing restaurants and other businesses were allowed to stay.) There has recently been talk about modifying Measure D zoning because considerable space on the northern waterfront stands empty.

Part of California fishermen’s problem is that they operate in market frameworks that have become obsolete. Scarcity of fish is a fact under the current regulatory environment, but the market structure doesn’t allow fishermen to benefit from the higher values that scarcity could bring. For the most part, fishermen sell their whole catch at once, as farmers might a load of grain or other commodity. The lack of competition among buyers and markets leaves them little choice but to take the price they are offered.

“Our fishermen harvest pearls and are forced to sell their seafood products for the price of a shell,” said Algert. “What is needed is innovative new thinking on markets to get this incredible fresh seafood to our California consumers and add price value to the fishermen. A transition must be made from high-volume low-end to low-volume high-end.”

Commercial fishing in California declined for many years, largely because of overfishing and habitat damage. In the 1950s and ’60s, up to 50 trawlers, 60–70 feet long, went for groundfish out of Morro Bay, wreaking havoc on bottom habitat. The federal government encouraged industrial-scale commercial fishing by offering low-interest loans. Regulation began only in the 1980s, too late to prevent depletion of some groundfish stocks.

But many corrective measures have been taken in recent years and “things are looking up, generally,” according to marine ecologist Rod Fujita of Environmental Defense. Some groundfish stocks are now rebounding and fishermen report that some populations are abundant. However, Fujita notes that only 23 of the 82 species of groundfish that are commercially exploited off the West Coast have been assessed, and that about a quarter of those were found to be overfished.

A federal buyout program has reduced the number of fishing vessels, enabling those that remain to get their trip limits. The Nature Conservancy is now negotiating with several of the seven federal bottom-trawl permit holders for the purchase of their groundfish permits and, in some cases, their vessels. It is also exploring a possible temporary lease-back, to help these fishermen to prepare for the transition.

The Nature Conservancy is eager to establish a long-term relationship with the central coast fishing industry and ports, said Chuck Cook, the conservancy’s project director of coastal and marine affairs for California, partly because these fishermen agreed to the establishment of large no-trawl zones—3.8 million acres between Point Conception and Point Sur. The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) decided last June to establish these zones. They go into effect in May 2006, protecting some of the most richly diverse marine ecosystems along the California coast, as well as historic fishing grounds.

By agreeing to protect these areas, Cook pointed out, the groundfish fishermen agreed to close existing and potential fishing grounds in an area about the size of Connecticut. Now the Nature Conservancy intends to help create a more robust fishery and working wharf while at the same time protecting underwater habitat.

“The PFMC has taken many painful steps to conserve fish stocks,” Fujita noted. At the state level, the Marine Life Management Act, “one of the best and most precautionary fishery laws in the world,” according to Fujita, has led to reductions of nearshore quotas and permits to conserve nearshore fish species and ecosystems such as kelp forests.

These conservation measures may improve the prospects for fishermen in the future, but now they impose further hardships. “Depleted fish stocks are no longer our problem here in Morro Bay,” Algert says. “Most days we never even have a boat leave the harbor, since the regulatory regime doesn’t let them fish.” To survive, commercial fishermen must adapt to the current conditions and options.

With that in mind, the Fishing Heritage Group was formed early in 2005. A collaborative effort by Environmental Defense, the Nature Conservancy, fishermen, Central Coast harbors, and others, it is “creating a vision of selective fishing, catching lower volumes but bringing in much higher value,” Fujita said. The goal is a sustainable local fishing industry that enables fishermen to make a living while protecting marine life and habitat and allowing the region’s ports to continue processing and distribution.

The demand for fresh and wild seafood products of local origin has been growing, much like the demand for local and organic produce, meat, and dairy products. Fishermen are realizing they need to tap into that demand. The Heritage Group is talking about marketing fish and shellfish in a variety of ways, including directly from fishing boats to consumers, as is being done in Santa Barbara and at Pillar Point Harbor on Half Moon Bay. They are thinking of “value-added” products that could be developed. Instead of sending fresh albacore overseas for canning, or shipping premium fish like black cod (sablefish) to Asian markets, they might prepare these delectable fish for sale to California consumers. To reinvent the local commercial fishing industry, a creative business plan based on sound market and business analysis will be essential.

The business model adopted by Mark Tognazzini and his family is an example of the kind of creative thinking that’s needed. A commercial fisherman for 35 years, Tognazzini sells some of his catch directly off his boat, the Bonnie Marrietta, notifying his list of customers by e-mail every Thursday of his “Weekly Specials.” He also features local fish on the menu of Tognazzini’s Dockside Restaurant in Morro Bay, which he runs with his wife, Bonnie, and their family. They bought the restaurant in 2004. If you ask for the special, he is likely to come to your table with a logbook and look up who caught your fish and where. He invited fellow fishermen to decorate the restaurant’s 23 tables with personal photos, placed under glass. The restaurant’s back door opens onto the wharf. Diners are apt to see fishermen both inside and outside the place.

On the day I ate lunch there, John Lindsay, operations manager for the nonprofit Morro Bay Fisherman’s Wharf, had stopped in for a cup of coffee and a chat. Tognazzini had just leafed through the Spring/Summer issue of Coast & Ocean and highlighted some lines in the “Fishwise” story, which stated that “some salmon fishers still use longlines.” This is not true, Lindsay said, and Tognazzini agreed. “Salmon are all caught by single hook, except by Indians.” [True in California—not longlining but trolling is the hook-and-line method for salmon; some tribes use gillnets or traditional dipnets.—Ed.]

There is no single formula for success, and most fishing communities attempting to make this transition will require financial assistance. A fisheries revolving loan fund (conceived of by Environmental Defense) for fishermen and their communities is in the works. The Coastal Conservancy and California Ocean Protection Council together have committed $101,000 towards its development. Initial capitalization of up to $2 million is expected to follow. To make sure that fishermen continue to have access to the city dock, the Nature Conservancy has offered to help pay part of the operating costs temporarily.

The hope is that commercial fishing can continue as part of the fabric of life in Morro Bay even with growing numbers of visitors and new residents—including retirees from the Central Valley and coastal metropolitan areas to the north and south—who come to enjoy the natural beauty and wildlife of the region. Morro Bay is a great place for birding. In addition to enjoying the wildlife, however, these new residents may also increase the demand for locally caught seafood.

Meanwhile, the city is continuing to improve public access to its waterfront. The latest project is Harborwalk, a new mile-long path that will link the waterfront’s commercial retail and fishing area with the beaches surrounding Morro Rock. Funded in part by $500,000 from the Coastal Conservancy, it is to open on Memorial Day, 2006.

A million people now visit the Morro Bay waterfront every year. Soon more will come. If the fishing industry succeeds in making the turnaround to sustainability, visitors will be offered local seafood. The Millers might try the local albacore, boccacio, cabezon, or lingcod and discover new reasons to return.

	California Coast & Ocean
	On the Morro Bay Waterfront Reinventing a Local Fishery
	Rasa Gustaitis
	They were standing on the Embarcadero, outside one of the tourist-oriented shops, as if trying to decide where to go next. They looked so content and friendly, and so obviously weren’t locals, that I was emboldened to ask: “What brought you to Morro Bay?” “The charm of a small seaside village,” answered Bob Miller, of San Clemente. He and his wife had been driving down the coast and decided to stop in the town. “We came here several times with the children in the ’70s, when we lived in Anaheim,” Celine Miller explained. “We tried to find the place where we had clam chowder—and we did find it.” They had concluded that the town hadn’t changed all that much. It was early afternoon on a lovely September Wednesday, and the Morro Bay waterfront was pretty quiet. On the Embarcadero, banners at shop doorways stirred in the light breeze. From the boardwalk along the glittering water, a few small boats were visible near Morro Rock, the ancient volcanic plug that is the main local landmark. The Rock is home to two pairs of nesting peregrine falcons, as well as plovers, guillemots, cormorants, and other birds. In the past, stone was quarried from the Rock, using explosives, to build roads and harbors. Now it’s a wildlife reserve. At the south end of town, a small boy and his mother had Tidelands Park to themselves, with its playful sculptures of sea mammals and a wooden-boat climbing structure. To the north, on the wharf near the three smokestacks of the Duke Energy power plant, a couple of fishermen were putting away their gear. The Millers had whetted my appetite for clam chowder, so I headed north along the waterfront and soon arrived at the Li’l Hut, where I found chowder on the menu posted beside the take-out window. “The clams are local, right?” I asked. “Nope,” was the response from within. “Well, I’d like something local, so what’s local?” “There’s nothing local. Everything’s from somewhere else,” answered the manager, Tammy Jones. The Li’l Hut is only steps away from the wharf where fishing boats come in with their catch. “Everything’s from somewhere else?” “That’s right.” 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 helped the Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Organization take on the lease and, with funding from the Coastal Conservancy, improved the wharf. In 1984, to prevent tourist businesses from pricing fishermen out of the working waterfront, citizens passed Measure D, a voter initiative that rezoned the northern waterfront for waterfront-dependent uses. (Existing restaurants and other businesses were allowed to stay.) There has recently been talk about modifying Measure D zoning because considerable space on the northern waterfront stands empty. Part of California fishermen’s problem is that they operate in market frameworks that have become obsolete. Scarcity of fish is a fact under the current regulatory environment, but the market structure doesn’t allow fishermen to benefit from the higher values that scarcity could bring. For the most part, fishermen sell their whole catch at once, as farmers might a load of grain or other commodity. The lack of competition among buyers and markets leaves them little choice but to take the price they are offered. “Our fishermen harvest pearls and are forced to sell their seafood products for the price of a shell,” said Algert. “What is needed is innovative new thinking on markets to get this incredible fresh seafood to our California consumers and add price value to the fishermen. A transition must be made from high-volume low-end to low-volume high-end.” Commercial fishing in California declined for many years, largely because of overfishing and habitat damage. In the 1950s and ’60s, up to 50 trawlers, 60–70 feet long, went for groundfish out of Morro Bay, wreaking havoc on bottom habitat. The federal government encouraged industrial-scale commercial fishing by offering low-interest loans. Regulation began only in the 1980s, too late to prevent depletion of some groundfish stocks. But many corrective measures have been taken in recent years and “things are looking up, generally,” according to marine ecologist Rod Fujita of Environmental Defense. Some groundfish stocks are now rebounding and fishermen report that some populations are abundant. However, Fujita notes that only 23 of the 82 species of groundfish that are commercially exploited off the West Coast have been assessed, and that about a quarter of those were found to be overfished. A federal buyout program has reduced the number of fishing vessels, enabling those that remain to get their trip limits. The Nature Conservancy is now negotiating with several of the seven federal bottom-trawl permit holders for the purchase of their groundfish permits and, in some cases, their vessels. It is also exploring a possible temporary lease-back, to help these fishermen to prepare for the transition. The Nature Conservancy is eager to establish a long-term relationship with the central coast fishing industry and ports, said Chuck Cook, the conservancy’s project director of coastal and marine affairs for California, partly because these fishermen agreed to the establishment of large no-trawl zones—3.8 million acres between Point Conception and Point Sur. The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) decided last June to establish these zones. They go into effect in May 2006, protecting some of the most richly diverse marine ecosystems along the California coast, as well as historic fishing grounds. By agreeing to protect these areas, Cook pointed out, the groundfish fishermen agreed to close existing and potential fishing grounds in an area about the size of Connecticut. Now the Nature Conservancy intends to help create a more robust fishery and working wharf while at the same time protecting underwater habitat. “The PFMC has taken many painful steps to conserve fish stocks,” Fujita noted. At the state level, the Marine Life Management Act, “one of the best and most precautionary fishery laws in the world,” according to Fujita, has led to reductions of nearshore quotas and permits to conserve nearshore fish species and ecosystems such as kelp forests. These conservation measures may improve the prospects for fishermen in the future, but now they impose further hardships. “Depleted fish stocks are no longer our problem here in Morro Bay,” Algert says. “Most days we never even have a boat leave the harbor, since the regulatory regime doesn’t let them fish.” To survive, commercial fishermen must adapt to the current conditions and options. With that in mind, the Fishing Heritage Group was formed early in 2005. A collaborative effort by Environmental Defense, the Nature Conservancy, fishermen, Central Coast harbors, and others, it is “creating a vision of selective fishing, catching lower volumes but bringing in much higher value,” Fujita said. The goal is a sustainable local fishing industry that enables fishermen to make a living while protecting marine life and habitat and allowing the region’s ports to continue processing and distribution. Boat to Table The demand for fresh and wild seafood products of local origin has been growing, much like the demand for local and organic produce, meat, and dairy products. Fishermen are realizing they need to tap into that demand. The Heritage Group is talking about marketing fish and shellfish in a variety of ways, including directly from fishing boats to consumers, as is being done in Santa Barbara and at Pillar Point Harbor on Half Moon Bay. They are thinking of “value-added” products that could be developed. Instead of sending fresh albacore overseas for canning, or shipping premium fish like black cod (sablefish) to Asian markets, they might prepare these delectable fish for sale to California consumers. To reinvent the local commercial fishing industry, a creative business plan based on sound market and business analysis will be essential. The business model adopted by Mark Tognazzini and his family is an example of the kind of creative thinking that’s needed. A commercial fisherman for 35 years, Tognazzini sells some of his catch directly off his boat, the Bonnie Marrietta, notifying his list of customers by e-mail every Thursday of his “Weekly Specials.” He also features local fish on the menu of Tognazzini’s Dockside Restaurant in Morro Bay, which he runs with his wife, Bonnie, and their family. They bought the restaurant in 2004. If you ask for the special, he is likely to come to your table with a logbook and look up who caught your fish and where. He invited fellow fishermen to decorate the restaurant’s 23 tables with personal photos, placed under glass. The restaurant’s back door opens onto the wharf. Diners are apt to see fishermen both inside and outside the place. On the day I ate lunch there, John Lindsay, operations manager for the nonprofit Morro Bay Fisherman’s Wharf, had stopped in for a cup of coffee and a chat. Tognazzini had just leafed through the Spring/Summer issue of Coast & Ocean and highlighted some lines in the “Fishwise” story, which stated that “some salmon fishers still use longlines.” This is not true, Lindsay said, and Tognazzini agreed. “Salmon are all caught by single hook, except by Indians.” [True in California—not longlining but trolling is the hook-and-line method for salmon; some tribes use gillnets or traditional dipnets.—Ed.] There is no single formula for success, and most fishing communities attempting to make this transition will require financial assistance. A fisheries revolving loan fund (conceived of by Environmental Defense) for fishermen and their communities is in the works. The Coastal Conservancy and California Ocean Protection Council together have committed $101,000 towards its development. Initial capitalization of up to $2 million is expected to follow. To make sure that fishermen continue to have access to the city dock, the Nature Conservancy has offered to help pay part of the operating costs temporarily. The hope is that commercial fishing can continue as part of the fabric of life in Morro Bay even with growing numbers of visitors and new residents—including retirees from the Central Valley and coastal metropolitan areas to the north and south—who come to enjoy the natural beauty and wildlife of the region. Morro Bay is a great place for birding. In addition to enjoying the wildlife, however, these new residents may also increase the demand for locally caught seafood. Meanwhile, the city is continuing to improve public access to its waterfront. The latest project is Harborwalk, a new mile-long path that will link the waterfront’s commercial retail and fishing area with the beaches surrounding Morro Rock. Funded in part by $500,000 from the Coastal Conservancy, it is to open on Memorial Day, 2006. A million people now visit the Morro Bay waterfront every year. Soon more will come. If the fishing industry succeeds in making the turnaround to sustainability, visitors will be offered local seafood. The Millers might try the local albacore, boccacio, cabezon, or lingcod and discover new reasons to return.