West Coast sardine fishery being shut down
The history of the sardine industry in the Monterey Bay is now about as famous as the man who made it that way, with his novel “Cannery Row”. While it may not be what it once was, one part of that history is now repeating itself, as the fishery again prepares to shut down.
Long time fisherman Anthony Russo says, “Anything taken away from you hurts, you know?” If you ask any fisherman who has been skimming the seas for as long as Anthony Russo, they’ll tell you about a time when sardines were nothing more than legend. He says, “When I started fishing they were gone, if you saw a sardine you’d want to mount it, there wasn’t even one in the whole ocean.”
Now nearly 75 years after the historic collapse of the fishery, the resource is again dwindling in our waters, and as of july first, commercial fishing for sardines on the West coast is again closed. Pacific Fishery Management Council member David Crabbe says, “Over the years sardines have had high volumes and low volumes and it’s my belief that recruitment is a big part of that.”
Crabbe and the other members of the council met in April to make several big decisions about the industry and its future. He says, “And it can be to the tune of millions of dollars, so it’s going to be a big impact.” “If there’s no squid and there’s not an opportunity to go sardines, that plant is quiet and so there’s a lot of people out of work,” according to Crabbe. He says the call to close the fishery was inevitable, with the sardine population falling below the mandatory shutdown level, but there were other big concerns. The council did allow for sardines to be caught inadvertently by those fisherman out to catch squid, mackerel, or anchovies, but they reduced the number. Russo says, “Thank god they did that, that was a great thing they did. If we wouldn’t have had that there we’d be tied up.”
An emergency closure this season was even considered as some environmentalists expressed concerns that overfishing was taking away an important food source for wildlife. Something fisherman like Russo say is just not true, “I’m getting tired of the you know, ‘we’re the rapers of the ocean,’ we’re not. We want that ocean healthy, we just harvest the ocean like everybody else harvests.”
Still, for Crabbe and other fishermen, the vast ocean we share has promise, with warmer waters this year and a projected El Nino. Crabbe says, “Those are good things for sardine recruitment and so we could see another increase in volume that could allow for a directed fishery to open back up in a short period of time.” Far from the half century it took last time and hopefully not nearly as damaging to an industry still so important to the Monterey Bay economy, and a fishing tradition that goes back generations. Russo says, “It’s a really good life, but you don’t see many young people doing it any more because it’s really hard to get into and with all the regulations and everything, it’s hard to make a dollar.”
There is still a lot of debate, even about the science behind how these estimates of sardines are measured, and Crabbe says that is being discussed. He says a methodology review for one of the ways they count sardines, the acoustic survey, is planned for this year.
