February 22, 2018 — Cities along the Monterey Bay are full of seafood restaurants. But what ends up on your plate can often come from another part of the country, even another part of the world. The Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust wants to change that by breathing new life into Monterey’s commercial fishing industry.
Scott Fosmark opens the metal gate to the Monterey Municipal Marina. He’s wearing a black baseball cap with a logo for his family business, Fosmark Fisheries, LLC.
It’s a sunny winter day on the waterfront. We walk down a ramp that leads us to the rows of white sailboats, each tightly tied to the dock with rope. It’s a beautiful scene, but Fosmark seems almost homesick.
This whole harbor used to be completely filled with commercial fishing boats. I can remember coming down here with my grandfather and having him unload his salmon right here,” says Fosmark.
Fosmark is a fifth generation commercial fisherman from Monterey. He grew up on his parents’ boat, pulling in albacore at just six-years-old. But now, his boats are up in Oregon.
“I’m sure a lot of people are probably scratching their heads, why are there no fishing boats here? Well, you know, the fish stocks were challenged,” Fosmark says.
Twenty years ago, the federal government declared many of the popular species caught off Monterey, like rockfish, overfished. This limited the number that could be caught. To help the fish recover, what’s called the “catch share” program was created. It requires fishermen to own fishing rights, which are expensive and hard to get. Many local fishermen got priced out by bigger companies with deeper pockets.
Fosmark says, “They left Monterey, they went up to the Pacific Northwest.”
Then, in 2014, the non-profit Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust formed to support smaller, local fishing operations. It currently has rights to fish about six and a half million pounds of groundfish, which it leases to local fishermen at a discounted price. Sherry Flumerfelt is the Executive Director of the Fisheries Trust.
“Having access to fishing rights is one piece of a much larger puzzle,” says Flumerfelt.
She says another piece of the puzzle is the buyer. Because when the boats left, local restaurants, stores and cafeterias had to form other relationships with other suppliers.