June 10, 2019 — Thirty miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon, Mikey Retherford Jr. is watching rockfish in the ocean below him on a screen in the wheelhouse of the Winona J fishing trawler.
“See that right there?” he says, pointing at a yellow blob on the screen. “Boom! We don’t want to miss that. That’s there is widow rockfish. That’s what we’re targeting right there. That’s a very large school of fish.”
About 30 minutes later, his crew reels in a massive tube of netting stuffed with widow rockfish – one of dozens of groundfish species that live at the bottom of the ocean. The fish pour out of the net in a steady stream, and as they pile up, deckhands hose and shovel the giant pool of fish into hold under the deck.
Altogether, they land 60,000 pounds of widow rockfish. Retherford, 37, says for most of his career, a haul like this was unthinkable.
“When I started working for my dad as an adult full-time, it was like oh, we can’t catch rockfish,” he said.