January 4, 2018 — Many rural Oregon towns share the same problems; the natural resources they traditionally based their economies on no longer support them, and isolation and limited funds often make solutions hard to come by. But how these communities grapple with these changes can vary.
JPR’s Liam Moriarty takes us to Port Orford, on the state’s south coast, to see how people in one fishing town are working to carve out a potential future.
About two miles south of Port Orford — and less than a mile off the beach — is a cluster of rocks and reefs. Sitting in the cabin of his fishing boat on the dock at the Port of Port Orford, Orion Ashdown says the area known as Redfish Rocks has been a favorite fishing ground.
For years, the abundance of species there drew Ashdown and other Port Orford commercial fishermen. But that ended in 2012, when the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife closed what had by then become the Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve. Now, the only fishing done there is for scientific research …
Leesa Cobb, with the non-profit Port Orford Ocean Resource Team, says the idea of closing a productive local fishing ground was at best, counterintuitive.