Back to PCFFA Fishermen's News Archive
“Shifting baselines” is the term used to describe the phenomena of changing frames of reference for the purpose of giving the illusion of progress or minimizing reportable losses. Environmentalists and some fishery scientists frequently use it referring to the use of season-to-season changes, or occurring within five or ten year periods, instead of looking at historic data for measuring trends in resource productivity. The term comes to mind now in recent years listening to federal bureaucrats discuss the salmon fishery.
Over the past few seasons they’ve claimed success pointing to higher landings than the previous years. In California, for example, when the season hit approximately 5 million pounds a year there was a lot of self-congratulations within the “federal family.” Of course, what they failed to mention in their discussions with the press and the Congress is that California’s long term average was 7 million pounds of chinook in its commercial troll fishery over the past 40 years. The gains being touted were those made over seasons of the past decade where production had been impacted by drought and a severe one-year El Niño. The 2004 season looked good only when compared to those it immediately followed, but in a historic context it was pathetic.
It is true the catch-per-unit of effort in the ocean salmon fishery offshore Oregon and California has been at some of the highest levels ever, if not the highest. That’s great, except for that fact that we have a fleet that’s been reduced by about 80 percent over the past score of years. Put in that perspective, the CPUE increase is little consolation for all the dreams that were dashed, the jobs lost, the vessels beached for lack of buyers.
Oh sure, prices have gone up in the past couple of seasons for wild salmon. They’re now back to where we were around 1988, but in 2005 dollars that’s considerably less real money than that season of record ocean salmon production (at least in California). Rather than using 2001 or 1991 as a baseline, I’d prefer to shift it to 1988. That year California produced 14 million pounds of chinook – not much compared to Alaska – but pretty damned good for a state that a few decades earlier declared it was “not in the public interest to maintain the salmon fishery.” I raise that exceptional season, not just because it gave us an idea of our true production potential, but it provides us a better indicator than the average year or the mediocre seasons the government would have us use as our baseline for measuring actual progress in the fishery.
1988 came to mind again this year. This 2005 season should have been the year California, Oregon, even the remainder of the Washington troll fleet, had a good season – maybe even a 1988 – to help make up for the dismal ones of the past, and to help trollers get back on their feet economically. That was not to happen. We began to realize that in the fall of 2002 as the revelations of the spring and late summer fish kills on the Klamath told us that there was trouble ahead. It became a near certainty in the spring of 2004 when the estimates of the second lowest number of Klamath three-years olds on record were made. It became a certainty this spring when those 2004 estimates were confirmed that the very weak Klamath stocks would curtail access to what was thought to be a fair run on the Columbia and probably the biggest fall chinook run ever on the Sacramento, with salmon numbers possibly approaching the pre-federal dam days.
I bring this up because now we’re involved in trying to calculate the extent of the disaster, in what otherwise should have been – except for devastating federal water policies in the Klamath Basin - one of the better seasons of the past 50 years. (For more about how the Klamath disaster happened, see the April 2005 edition of FN, “Can’t Fish Salmon? Federal Klamath Water Policies Are To Blame,” on the web at: www.pcffa.org/fn-apr05.htm).
In the Klamath, too, we’re witnessing the government engaged in yet another exercise of shifting baselines. Instead of comparing this year’s expected production of salmon offshore Oregon and California to what it would have been if it were not for the Klamath fish kills, calculations were being made – at least initially – comparing this season’s probable production with an average of the past few years, during which numbers were considerably below historic averages. The impact of the closures on production is therefore being understated. Moreover, the higher prices paid today for wild troll chinooks, compared to the dismal prices of a few years ago brought on by the loss of markets due to poor production and a flood of imported farmed salmon, mask the true extent of the economic loss.
The environmentalists and scientists are right, we have been duped by shifting baselines to create an illusion of progress or, in the case of this year’s salmon season, to hide the true extent of devastating losses.
Salmon is not the only fishery where my baseline is different than the government’s. I constantly think about the possibilities for Dungeness crab, herring, oysters and shrimp (they were major fisheries in San Francisco Bay) and a lot of others as I look back in history and what was once produced. What drives me and, I hope, a lot of you is basing our goals, our progress and our losses on what we’re capable of producing, not what is average or mediocre that may satisfy a bureaucratic mind ignorant of the past. But salmon, for me, is highly personal and it all goes back to the summer of 1955.
I was seven that summer and went most every day to work with my father, as I would most weekends and holidays during the school year. This was something I chose to do and it got me out of the house and out of my mother’s way while she cared for my three younger siblings. Noyo Flat was a great place for a boy. The river ran west through the coastal redwoods to the sea just south of Fort Bragg along California’s north coast. Fort Bragg had been settled around the redwood and fir sawmills. In the early years most of supplies came in on ship and the primary transportation in and out of this then remote area was by the “doghole” schooners carrying lumber from the mills. The river was not large enough for those coastal schooners, but after the turn of the century it did provide shelter for small gasoline powered fishing boats tied to piles along the river bank where fish houses had begun to spring up to handle the salmon caught by this fleet. Over the course of the first half of the 20th century the river was dredged, a jetty built and it became easier to get in and out of the river and larger boats could be accommodated.
During the summer, the river was a flurry of activity. Besides fishing along the river and playing on the river in skiffs, it was a great place for a young boy just watching the activities and, if lucky, being allowed to help in some way these men we idolized. There were the boats that the boys – mostly sons of fishermen and fish house workers – had committed to memory, sometimes even the sound of their engines. There was the unloading, cutting and packaging of the fish, the engine and haul-out yards, not to mention the Makela Brothers boatbuilding shop.
Just the smells of the place gave it a richness and texture that couldn’t be found elsewhere, though I imagine it was not much different than the waterfront at Monterey, Astoria, San Pedro or most other fishing ports at that time. All I knew is this is where I wanted to be.
My father had come to Fort Bragg in the late 1940’s from Bellingham, along with his older brother from Anacortes and their young families with the idea of making it big in the fish reduction business in California and spending their winters in Mexico -- or at least that’s what they told me. Their timing was wrong; the heyday of the reduction business was nearing an end as the sardine populations were going into decline. Their location was all wrong too. They were really too far north for a fish reduction business and Fort Bragg was remote. They were also too far from Mexico to be able to just easily move there each winter.
Like most folks from the Pacific Northwest they had really no concept of the length of the California coastline. Seattle was as near Fort Bragg as any decent place on the Mexican coast. The idea was also totally impractical for young families, since you couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, be taking young children out of school during the middle of their sessions to head south of the border. The only fish buyer I ever knew who pulled that off was Cass Gidley who had a plant in Sausalito.
The brothers started a fish reduction business utilizing offal from the Paladini plant filet line, together with some sardines trucked up from Moss Landing and herring out of Tomales Bay. This was ground, cooked and made into a flour like meal, that was mainly used for mink feed, although it was a great fertilizer and mounds of it piled on the plant floor were just the thing for diving into for a boy of four or five.
In 1952 my father took over the United Fish Company from Frank Hyman who with his brothers had been active in the fishery at Noyo. Hyman, who had befriended my father, had numerous real estate holdings in the area and wanted to devote more time to those, including some housing developments. The company name was changed and my father was now in the business of buying salmon. So there he was with a reduction plant, a salmon packing plant and a boat yard that came in the deal with the reduction plant.
The concept for the crew he put together came straight out of my father’s ball playing days. He had a few old veterans and heading the line-up was his splitter Mel Davis. Davis began splitting salmon at the age of 18 in 1900. He was a large, strong man then in his 70’s. During his more than 50 years of cutting salmon, he had worked in plants from Pittsburg, California to Alaska and was regarded as one of the top splitters, if not the best, on the coast. Although he would mellow in his later years – he was forced to quit working in 1969 because of eye problems and died in 1970 while recovering from eye surgery before he could return to work.
Davis was cantankerous and during those days in the 1950’s he could strike fear in the hearts of co-workers, fishermen and young boys playing about the fish house. He was a stickler for quality -- for the salmon that went into the barrel, his woodwork, as well as his women and whisky (Wild Turkey). He would warm his knarled, arthritic hand each morning and wrap it around the knife he had taken great care sharpening, and then stand day long splitting the fish that had come in the day before (same day fish were too jelly-like to split easily, and were put on ice overnight before being cut). He would brandish that knife, too, at young workers or fishermen hollering out “handle them like eggs.” Davis could often be seen chasing a young Les Amundsen, who headed the fish, around the plant when Mel would catch Les trying his hand at splitting. If Mel Davis were alive today, I would not want to see him at Pike Street Market, particularly with a knife in hand, where the yahoos are throwing salmon to entertain tourists.
Another veteran was charged with packing the fish in the barrels and coopering them, preparing these 900 pound tierces of salmon sides for shipment to the New York smoke houses. Rounding out the crew were a brash group of high school and college students working during the summer unloading fish and packing in boxes those for the fresh market, as well as working the slime line taking any remaining entrails, blood from the veins and sea lice off the sides of salmon before they were packed in salt in barrels. The best jobs for teenagers at that time were as boat pullers or working in the fish plants. The money was usually good and the long hours meant there was no time to spend it or to get into trouble. What was earned usually went to buy a boat for themselves, pay for college, or both.
Like the salmon being taken in the net fishery on San Francisco Bay and the Delta, troll fish were being delivered that time in the round. This meant the fish were often belly burned and of poor quality. To get a foothold in the quality segment of the market both for mild cure and fresh markets, my father began insisting on all fish being cleaned at sea and delivered dressed. He was willing to pay more. In fact, he helped the local fishermen form the Salmon Trollers Marketing Association in 1953, providing them the ability to collectively bargain for fish prices with processors, which they had lost in the late 1940’s when during the height of the anti-union days in the country the U.S. Justice Department succeeded in breaking up the coastwide fishermen’s union.
In 1955, near the Noyo River mouth, was Ray Welsh’s “Sportsman’s Dock” where there was a charter boat and skiffs for rent to anglers. Welsh, who had been a former official in the fishermen’s union, had been ordered by a federal judge to refrain from engaging in any commercial fishing activities in return for not going to jail. So Ray started a business to cater to sport fishermen and wrote an outdoors column for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Ray and my father would collaborate in the fall and winter of 1956, following the State Legislature’s closure of the century-old Bay-Delta salmon gillnet fishery, to form Salmon Unlimited, a coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen, fish processors and fish scientists who dedicated themselves to protecting and restoring the state’s salmon fishery. Recreational and ocean commercial fishermen felt they would be next to be closed if they didn’t take action to save the fish stocks. Welsh would remain active in Salmon Unlimited until his death in the mid-1980’s.
Going up the river was Jimmy Cummings’ “Fishermen’s Wharf” that also ran a charter boat and sport fishing tackle shop, adjacent to a trailer park he owned and some other buildings. The Mobil fuel and ice dock was just south up the river and that was run by Dan McRae. My father’s plant was next, a large red wooden building whose sign had been changed to Grader Fish Company. Next to his plant on the same wharf was Bill and Loren Westphal’s marine engine repair shop, where they specialized in Jimmy diesels and Chrysler gas engines. Housed in a green wooden building sandwiched between the boat weighs run by the Westphal’s and that adjacent to my father’s reduction plant was the Meredith Fish Company buying station, run by Bill and Beulah West. From what I remember, everything that came across that dock went by truck straight to their main plant in Sacramento.
Next to the reduction plant was the A. Paladini Company operation. This was the largest plant on Noyo flat and the only one that did not depend primarily on salmon. Paladini was the biggest fish processor in Northern California at that time and their Fort Bragg plant ran a filet line for groundfish and picking lines for Dungeness crab and pink shrimp. This plant, managed by Louis and Reno Cavallini, also froze salmon (decent freezing facilities were non-existent at that time on the flat except for Paladini’s). Across the river was the Noyo River Fish Company run by Tony Caito and on the west side of the river with him was the F. Alioto Fish Company run by Tony Tarantino. These latter three plants were all based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Further up the river, next to where Hwy 1 had crossed the river, prior to the bridge being built high over the river mouth, was the Makela boat shop, where Fred and Nick Makela would turn out a new boat every couple years, between renovations (usually new wheelhouses and/or bulwarks) on existing boats.
Next to the Makela brothers shop was another boatyard. The mooring basin was still 10 years away and to protect the boats from being washed to sea during the winter freshets, when the river would surge with muddy water and debris from logging operations upstream, most would haul their boats out for the winter and the boat yards were as much for storage as they were for repair or maintenance. Across from the Makela brothers’ shop and the Alioto plant was Johnny Ghens’ Noyo Store, with groceries and fishing gear, Carine’s restaurant, where they ran their own boat and cooked crab, and the ice house, run by Gene Thompson and his brother-in-law Mel Melsher making the 300 pound blocks of ice the fleet and the processing plants depended on for chilling the fish.
Fort Bragg, at that time, as it had been for most of the past 100 years, was still relatively isolated. We did not have television – reception was nearly non-existent – and my family would not have a television for another five years. There was no little league baseball then and about the only planned activities for youth in those days were the church run summer classes which all of my friends and I worked to avoid. Summer vacation trips were out of the question, since this was the height of the salmon season. Young boys when they got to 10 or 11, before they were old enough to get hired on a boat or work in a fish plant, could earn some pocket change cleaning fish for the tourists or making fish boxes.
For those of us who were younger, we fished along the river, messed about in skiffs, hopped rides on the fishing boats moving from the fish plants to their tie-up spots where they were rafted along the river bank. We would go from fish house to fish house to catch whatever was going on, sit and watch for hours the Westphals put an engine back together or the Makela brothers plank a boat, trying to keep out the way and often sent to fetch a non-existent tool. Sometimes we could get into the ice house to watch the blocks of ice being pulled from their molds or ride on the ice truck to the fuel dock. Other times we’d ride along with one of the fishermen to the radio repair man in town to check the tubes on their radios or try to fix their Loran 4 or the rudimentary fish finders of that time. Snug Harbor was the coffee shop where as boys we could hear the stories and learn great new words they wouldn’t allow us to use in school.
The time of day or the time of year for me seemed to revolve around fishing or those in the fishery. I had learned to tell time by watching the clock and the hour that Nick Lackey, who was a few years older than me, would get out of school so I could pal around with him. Nick’s father, Paul, was a fisherman who later became a prolific steel boatbuilder. Nick went into fishing right after high school, buying John Rezendes’ Isabelle before getting drafted and serving in Vietnam as a forward observer. He survived Vietnam and the sinking of the Cape Mendocino, the boat he had built after getting back. Somewhere along the line Nick got religion and when he bought Lawrence Effie’s Kettenburg, the Little Mike, he changed the name to the Blessed Redeemer. I was home that Christmas sometime in the late 1970’s when we got word Nick’s boat went down crabbing off Oregon. I thought he was lost, another in a long line of school friends and others I knew who had gone down, but a few days later we got word he had been picked up alone in his life raft far offshore by a freighter. Nick did not go back fishing after that and last I heard was a steelworker somewhere in upstate New York.
From the time I was about five I would wait each spring for word that some of the Seattle-based trollers had come into port. There were at that time an increasing number of husband and wife trollers and I had gotten to know most of them and spent a lot of time on their boats when they were in port. There were Jim and Lucy McCormick on the Olympic, Hump Tryon on the Sandra Sue, Dan and Mary Hjort on Molly and a handful of others. This was a big help for my father, since they would keep an eye on me and some of the other “river rats” having way too much fun in these totally unsupervised summers.
Noyo Flat was a community unto itself in those days, particularly in the summer. There were the young boys my age running free. There were the teenagers working in the plants and on the back decks of the boats. There were the wives coming down to the river to greet their husbands, sometimes bringing groceries if they needed to turn around right away, and pick up the fish checks. There were the women who fished with their husbands, mostly on the handful of Washington trollers who preferred fishing off Fort Bragg in the summer. There was even one woman in the fleet who owned and operated her own boat and, of course, was made secretary for the newly-formed Salmon Trollers Marketing Association. Women were on some of the filet lines, but Mel for years would not allow women in my father’s fish house. Bad luck, I suppose he figured, like women in the pits at Indy. That meant my father was bringing the books home to my mother to do. Mel would later relent and my mother would work in the office and all the kids would work in the plant, including my sisters on the slime line. If it takes a village to raise a child, then my village was a fishing fleet.
After 50 years, the names and images of so many of the fishermen and others in that community remain vivid. There was Archie Blair, a veteran of World War I who brought a bride back from France. Madame Blair would come down each afternoon to “greet her Archie” and in her thick accent talk about the nice fish Archie would bring in and how clean the Salty was compared to the other boats. She was right, but there was also Frank Haun on the Don Maury who took great pride in his catch and who my father would later hook as a director for Salmon Unlimited and advisor to the state committee on salmon and steelhead put together in the late 1960’s. There was a young Bill Maahs who shared a deep commitment to salmon conservation and a good thing, too, because he along with Dave Danbom and Earl Carpenter would become California’s top producing salmon fishermen. There was Elmer Jones, whose boat was still unnamed at the time, and who had a Hicks gasoline engine, easily identifiable from the rest of the fleet running Chryslers or Jimmys.
There were Lowell and Corinne Prine. Corinne often helped care for my brother and sisters when they were young and after her children left home joined Lowell fishing aboard the Lillimac usually with the Seattle-based boats. Irwin Baker had the boat most admired in the fleet, his Sandy B, that he built himself a couple of years earlier. Baker had also helped found the Salmon Trollers. Like Baker, Nelson Miles also fished for Tony Tarantino with his Millie M before it was lost to one of those winter freshets in the Noyo and Nelson became one of the first to build the new series of steel trollers.
The Cox brothers – Bobby and Elwin were fishing at that time with their father. Bobby is still fishing off Oregon and Elwin recently retired. Rich Haman and his brother Lee arrived in Fort Bragg about that time. He set the tone for salmon production out of Shelter Cove, with trips of nearly 10,000 lbs each and he would make immediate turn arounds taking no time off in port as long as the weather cooperated. He had the Elsinore at that time and later owned the dragger Advance that went down off Eureka in the early 1970’s with his son Steve aboard.
There were the Figuieredo brothers who had come from the Azores. Manuel, the oldest, owned the Noyo Star, one of two draggers homeported in Fort Bragg (Manuel would later be hired by the New Zealand government to advise them on the development of their fishing industry). There was Joe, who sometimes worked in my father’s fish plant and whose sons Joey and Danny went into fishing. John had the Audrey. He fished salmon and albacore and during the winter longlined blackcod. Years later John built the Sea Valley and Sea Valley II, longlining with his son Gene along the coast. Brothers Art and Ernie would follow.
The other trawler, the Northern Light, like the Noyo Star, was a fifty-something foot wooden dragger and owned by Ted Ocker whose crew consisted of the Urbani brothers. Occasionally the City of Bari, that I think was a former sardine seiner judging by its top house, would trawl out of Fort Bragg as would some of the Paladini and Alioto boats. But, mostly it was just the two draggers with the exception of Dick Wirta, who as I remember fished mostly albacore with his Makela-built Sea Wolf. There was some crabbing in the winter - Tino Tarantino, for example, on his family’s Tarantino Jr., another Makela-built boat.
That summer of ‘55 there were a number of teenagers about on Noyo Flat who would make their way into fishing, many whose names are familiar now along the coast. There were the Jardstrom cousins – Arnold and Larry; Jim Ponts; the Schnaubelt brothers – Ed and Rick; Ron Andreani; Bill Escola; Les Amundsen; Lou Botsford (who now spends time between teaching at UC Davis and stints for the FAO in Rome) and many others.
We had two markets for salmon at that time. The large kings (chinook) all went for mild cure. That is, they were split, the sides salted, put in tierces and shipped (at that time by rail) to the New York smoke houses for the lox trade. The medium kings (depending on the split, either 12 or 11 pounds or less) and small kings (under 8 pounds) along with the silvers (coho) all were boxed in ice and shipped overnight to Los Angeles for the fresh markets in the L.A. basin. The San Francisco based fish companies on the flat mostly supplied the San Francisco Bay Area and Meredith’s fish went to the Central Valley. The huge influx of silvers from the Columbia River hatcheries that would surpass king production during some seasons in the late 1960’s and 70’s had not yet happened.
The fish hit hard off Fort Bragg that summer. Between what was taken in the day boat fleet along the coast and the trip boats working out of Shelter Cove, Fort Bragg was the capital in salmon production. The fish overwhelmed the plant and makeshift bins were assembled on the floor as everyone scrambled to get the fish in the barrels or boxed and in the trucks going south. My memory of the time was of a flurry of activity, the long hours and a lot of happy faces. This was a season my father needed and it helped to establish him as a player in the business with his small plant; he was also well on his way to establishing himself as a producer of top quality salmon for the LA market and the New York smokers.
In the end over a million pounds of salmon came through his plant that season. Not bad for someone who had only been buying salmon for two years. Consider that since that time there have been seasons when the whole state’s production was just over a million pounds. It was the season he set his baseline around. There would be some good seasons to follow, but he was dead before the 1988 season rolled around, which might have given him a chance to best the summer of ‘55.
That season made a lot of fishermen healthy and they did not have to scramble for jobs that winter or try crabbing or something else to get by. What had been a great summer for me and some of my friends, where Noyo Flat was our “camp,” ended on a down note when school started the day of my birthday. But when my father did finally get a break there was a new bike for me and a new Buick for him -- a good season.
The next year he began handling fish for the Halibut Producers Cooperative (HPC – now the Seafood Producers Cooperative), which helped increase the share of salmon coming across his dock and was another step in his increasing closeness with the fishing fleet (although there were always the seasonal battles over price) that would be important in years to come in the struggle to conserve salmon stocks and maintain fishing communities.
Income from the fish company alone could not support the family, and my father later supplemented it running a weekly newspaper with my mother, working as a field representative for a Congressman (a coastal district that stretched from the Golden Gate to the Oregon border), and as Deputy Secretary for the California Resources Agency in the Pat Brown administration. He also gave a lot of his time, and before there was a PCFFA he acted as a kind of volunteer lobbyist for north coast fishermen in between some work for landowners and others that actually paid something.
I imagine any one of you who was raised in a fishing community during that time or whose father or other family were in fishing may have similar memories. There is nothing particularly special or unique about my own. I recount them here though for us to begin thinking about what our own baseline should be for our various fisheries. Are we going to put what we do today, what we plan for the future, in the context of what was average or mediocre, or on what we know has happened and what we believe can happen again?
I recognize that we are not going to turn back the clock. We’re not going to go back to the days of cotton line, mechanical gurdies and crude electronics. Today’s labor laws pretty well preclude most young people from working in fish plants or on fishing boats (unless it’s their parents). Television and planned activities have taken over the summers and free times children once enjoyed. In a time when children can’t even be trusted to the church, no one today would ever let a seven year old boy and his buddies run free and see what we saw and do what we did in the summer of ‘55.
On the other hand, there is no reason, with hard work and determination and a sense of our history that we cannot set our sights on better seasons for the future. I’m not talking about a one-shot affair, but on a sustainable basis. We know what we were capable of producing. We know from a lot of experience what happens when good management and conservation measures are implemented, especially those protecting habitat. The memories of that summer of 1955 are just that – memories. But that doesn’t mean we can’t set our goals high for fishing production, that doesn’t mean we can’t have vibrant fishing communities like I saw in 1955 – changed sure, but vibrant.
We know there is something terribly wrong when we have agencies insisting dams are part of the natural habitat or offshore oil platforms are essential fish habitat. Likewise it is just plain wrong for bureaucrats to claim success or minimize losses by making comparisons to what is average or mediocre. Let’s set our baselines on what we did best or what we’re best capable of, and let no bureaucrat ever rationalize or shift us off our fisheries.
That million pound season and the summer of ‘55 is not just a good memory but it is my motivator. It’s time we were all motivated by the good memories, the history of what fishermen have done and the knowledge of what we’re capable of doing.
Zeke Grader is the Executive Director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), the west coast’s largest trade association of commercial fishing families. Zeke can be reached at the San Francisco PCFFA office at PO Box 29370, SF, CA 94129-0370, (415)561-5080 or by email to: fish1ifr@aol.com. Also check out the PCFFA web site at: www.pcffa.org.
Back
to PCFFA Fishermen's News Archive