IT’S A SUNNY MORNING IN DECEMBER AND THE ROCKFISH AND BLACK COD ARE SHOWING UP IN GOOD NUMBERS, HUNGRY. At the docks in Moss Landing, Walter Deyerle, who fishes as part of a family fleet, offloads his catch from the boat straight into the back of a wholesale-to-the-public fish market his family opened in late 2023. The rockfish – specifically, vermillion rockfish, also known as “red snapper” or “rock cod” – are fresh, the red color vibrant and the fins twitching in the ice bucket.
“The populations are really healthy,” Deyerle says. “The problem is it’s not crab or salmon or tuna.”
Other species simply don’t match the market interest that salmon and crab have historically, the seasonal timing of which (salmon for summer and crab for winter) fell during prime times of years to sell their catch for a decent price.
The story isn’t new – for nearly seven years, the commercial Dungeness crab season has frequently been delayed until after the holiday season, often due to the presence of migrating whales and occasionally due to elevated marine toxins like domoic acid poisoning. For commercial Chinook salmon fishing, it’s been three consecutive years with no commercial fishery due to diminishing waterways where salmon spawn. For crab and salmon fishers, that translates to missing the peak window to sell a prized fish during the busiest time of year for restaurants and families looking to feast, especially during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season (non-local crab is sometimes available, often from Washington). And the crabs also happen to be meatier this time of year, making for an incredibly tasty seafood and profitable time for local fishers.
“Crab used to be nine months, it was a bigger part of your year,” Deyerle says. Now, the season has shrunk to about four months in the spring: “It couldn’t be worse. January [through] April are the toughest months to make it in the restaurant business, and that’s when Dungeness is open.”
In the years since, fishers have been adapting or sinking. Many harbors are reporting some level of attrition as fishers are leaving the industry, or simply aging out of it. “We don’t have much of a fleet here anymore,” says Tom Hart, a local fisherman who has been docked in Monterey Bay since the 1970s. “We had 80 to 100 boats, now it’s down to just a couple boats around here.”
In 1995, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife capped the number of vessels permitted to fish for Dungeness crab. Since then, those permits have been lost over time; CDFW estimates that a total of 552 permits were renewed in 2019, a decline of 18 percent since 1999 when 674 permits were renewed.
The workforce has also shrunk. Statewide, the total number of individuals buying commercial fishing licenses has decreased, from 18,510 in 2020 to 15,581 in 2024, according to the CDFW. And 2025 is poised to be lower still, sitting at 14,291 – 484 of those license holders participate in the Dungeness crab fishery.
Unlike the Chinook salmon fishery, the population numbers for Dungeness crab are actually doing quite well. The issue locally is prospective whale entanglements.
While regulations and gear catch up, some fishers are turning to other species, or needing to adjust their catch. But fishing for other fish that’s in season can be tougher to sell.
“I used to salmon fish and black cod fish for 22 years. I have not fished black cod for over a year now, just because of the market,” says Khevin Melluger, a fisherman based out of Santa Cruz. “I’m learning to fish smaller amounts of fish for people. I used to fish for quotas, like you get 2,000 pounds for your trip limit. Well, sometimes it’s hard to find somebody to buy 2,000 pounds.”
The challenge is how to market the fish – and where customers can find it.
JUST AROUND THE CORNER FROM SEA HARVEST’S WHOLESALE MARKET, where Walter Deyerle’s family fleet and several other boats drop their catch, is the headquarters of Real Good Fish, a company that serves as the middleman between the fisher and consumer. A vast majority of their fish is locally sourced: brought in from Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz and Bay Area waters, as well as other parts of California. Their aim is two-fold: to offer sustainably sourced seafood and to support local seafood economies, which in their view are one and the same.
“In general, unfortunately, fishermen often get lumped into this group of bad actors, and that’s just not the case,” says Alan Lovewell, co-founder of Real Good Fish. “Some of the most spirited, conservation-oriented, scientifically-oriented people I know are fishermen. And, those skills are really good for being a fisherman. To be a conservationist means that you’re protecting your livelihood and the resource that provides you a sustainable income.”
Demand for seafood nationwide has surged significantly, up 38 percent from 1990 to 2022, reaching 20.8 pounds per person per year. And so has our imported fish: Approximately 75 to 90 percent of U.S. seafood consumption comes from imported products, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Lovewell’s goal at Real Good Fish is to educate the consumer on questions to ask and the things to look for when buying fish – not an easy thing to do, he adds. Seafood is often mislabeled to appear as another, more popular, or “local” species, when it’s not. For example, Lovewell explains that many local restaurants list “sand dabs” on the menu when they’re actually serving arrowtooth flounder from Alaska, misleading people to think they’re eating a local product.
Rockfish (an umbrella term that includes nearly 60 species) sold locally often include vermilion, chilipepper, bocaccio, blackgill and gopher rockfish, each with its own distinct flavor characteristics. Black cod, confusingly, is the common name for sablefish and is not related to the cod family – it’s a fish found in deeper waters and has a more buttery flavor and silky texture.
“Our ethos is: Ask your servers and your retailers more questions about their seafood,” Lovewell says, “which unfortunately puts the onus on the consumer.”
He notes that asking where your food comes from isn’t meant to be conveyed as inherent distrust – but as a way for consumers to show they care about buying local. “It’s more about illustrating interest and demand that that’s what we want.”
At their offices in Moss Landing, Jenn Lovewell, Chief Nutrition Officer at Real Good Fish, walks through the packaging facility where they are receiving oysters, tuna and black cod. Their orders are customizable; if a customer doesn’t want oysters, or black cod, they’ll swap in alternative fish under the same flat rate.
Real Good Fish’s business model is to serve as the trusted broker of local seafood, in contrast to the average grocery store where fish may be trucked in from across the globe, farmed or caught in unsustainable ways, or simply difficult to verify what it is.
When regulations around local fisheries shift, so does their inventory. Their goal is to keep supply chains short and transparent, minimizing intermediaries and showing exactly where and how the fish was caught (printed on their packaging labels). Like a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box, they offer CSF (Community Supported Fishery) boxes filled with the seasonal fish they prepare at their packaging facility.
Jenn Lovewell explains that in recent years, bluefin tuna – once the poster child of overfishing – has returned, and has been found in local waters, a success story and one that fishers played a key role. “Shutting down a fishery pushes people to imports,” she says, adding that fisheries management requires collaboration between policy makers, data scientists and fishers. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all, especially on a local or fleet level scale.”
FROM A FISHER’S PERSPECTIVE, a good price plus consistency form the basic calculus – and the crab and salmon fishery have historically met those marks.
“Any fisherman interested in building a career on the water was pretty confident that they could make ends meet every month,” Alan Lovewell says.
Just to enter the business, fishers face a number of big ticket expenses: licensing, permitting, gear and maintenance among the most significant.
Permits, which must be renewed annually, vary widely in price depending on the fishery. If fishing in federal waters (between 3 to 200 nautical miles offshore) fishers must obtain a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service; if fishing in state waters, California Department of Fish and Wildlife is the go-to agency.
In many ways, permits reflect the health and vulnerability of a fishery – their structure and rarity illustrate the rules around how much protection the fishery requires. And, as long as a fisher renews each year, permits can be held indefinitely.
Take the spot prawn fishery, for example. It’s one of the most limited commercial fisheries on the West Coast, and 28 permits for commercial harvest are available statewide, managed by CDFW, with about two local fishers with a spot prawn permit fishing in local waters. That’s by design: Spot prawns are slow growing, making them easier to overfish. It’s also an incredibly lucrative fishery, averaging $40-$60 per pound, and driving up the cost of the permits to reach $1 million.
And then there are quotas, limits placed on the fishery which is shared by all permit holders. Tim Eelman, the chef at Solstice restaurant in Big Sur, says he averages paying $52 a pound for spot prawns.
“With that said, they’re one of my favorite ingredients of all time,” he says. “I mean, I absolutely love them. If I can get them, I get them.”
Commercial crabbing permits, more accessible but still capped, vary depending on boat size, number of traps, and other factors. For Hart, the cost to renew his permit, licenses and gear tags each year is around $4,000, money that’s tough to make back when the season is delayed. For the last three years he’s been trying to sell his permit so he can retire, hoping to get around $80,000 to $100,000. Six years ago, permits for his category were selling for around $200,000.
“I’ve made $200,000 in two months doing it before,” Hart says. “Now, they’re only worth half of what they used to be, because we can only make half as much.”
Rockfish, black cod and halibut are fisheries that remain somewhat reliable for local fishers. But competition is steep, and market demand is not the same as for crab or salmon. Deyerle explains that they are often competing against imports and large retailers that sell fish for as little as $4 a pound for fillets, a price that isn’t profitable for local fleets. At his wholesale market, these prices range from about $9 to $10 per pound for rockfish species and black cod.
He differentiates his fish by centering on quality handling, freshness and direct sales. For his family fleet, they are vertically integrated, allowing them to sell to restaurants his family owns (Sea Harvest restaurant in Carmel’s Crossroads shopping center, as well as Sea Harvest Restaurant & Fish Market in Monterey) which helps ensure demand and more control over pricing, as well as supply larger orders in the Bay Area.
“If you go into Costco, and take a look at the impact rockfish under those ultra bright lights, you can disguise [the quality],” he says. “But cook them side by side. When you take that one out of the package, you’ll immediately know the difference: One will be softer, smellier, fishier. Fresh fish should be firm and not taste so fishy.”
IN OCTOBER 2017, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a federal lawsuit against the CDFW for failing to protect Dungeness crab traps from entangling endangered whales, a lawsuit which ultimately reshaped the modern Dungeness crab fishery by formalizing a set of risk protections, including trap limits, and most significantly, shrinking the Dungeness crab season.
Ropeless crab traps have entered the arena as a possible solution via experimental fishing permits, which allow fishers with a permit to catch crab using methods that don’t leave a rope behind in the water column to entangle passing whales. But using such alternatives during the peak Dungeness crabbing season is still likely many years away, according to Craig Shuman of CDFW. Proof of concept – and more importantly, buy-in from the entire crabbing fleet to allow a new gear type into such a competitive market – is needed to take next steps.
Ropeless crab traps have shown promise in recent years as fishers have been trialing them throughout the spring and early summer seasons. Currently, three types of experimental fishing permits (EFPs) are in use in the Dungeness crab fishery: two that use a Bluetooth signal to deploy pop-up gear (under the Sub Sea Sonics EFP and the National Marine Sanctuary EFP), and one that does not use pop-up technology (under the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations), instead allowing fishers to retrieve underwater traps using grapples.
“We’ve set up a pretty complex system. But I think it is proving fruitful,” Shuman says, adding that the scope and scale has expanded significantly over the years. Under the Sub Sea Sonics EFP – one of the manufacturers of Bluetooth pop-up gear – they reported 217,633 pounds of crab landed in 2025, valued at $1,425,136.52 with an overall retrieval reliability of 99.2 percent.
Getting into this market doesn’t come without a cost. “We estimate about $1,200 per gear string for a typical string of 20 traps that is about $60 per trap,” says Bart Chadwick with Sub Sea Sonics, adding that a deck box, transducer and tablet for the vessel costs about $2,000.
“Things seemed like they went pretty well,” Shuman says. “But there’s a cost of entry.”
This year, the use of alternative fishing gear in the crab fishery is coinciding with new regulations known as RAMP 2.0, a framework under which CDFW – alongside a working group of fishers, conservationists and regulators – assesses whale-entanglement risk, manages crab fishery start times and approves alternative gear.
In other words, CDFW has more flexibility to authorize these gear types to move beyond experimental status, allowing for wider use in the Dungeness crab fishery.
“By having multiple years of testing, it’s allowed us to get to this point that I would expect we will have an authorized gear this spring,” Shuman says. “This I can’t say for sure, but I think that’s highly likely.”
But the use of pop-up alternative gear methods during the holiday season is still far away.
“For a season opener, to try to get back the holiday markets, that would be a whole different dynamic that we would have to try to figure out, because there’s so much money at stake,” he says. “We’ve said, if you want the holiday markets, we can try to figure out how to get you there, but it’s going to look different.”
THIS TIME OF YEAR, dock sales typically slow down without crab, according to Vicki Crow, who runs dock sales at A-Dock, adjacent to the Harbormaster’s Office in Moss Landing, near her boat Beticia.
Right now she’s primarily selling halibut, sometimes groundfish and lingcod, usually to regular customers or those who text her after getting her number from the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. The commercial California halibut fishery is open year-round for hook-and-line fishermen and managed by CDFW, while the Pacific halibut fishery is federally managed by National Marine Fisheries Service.
Crow is one of the only people running dock sales in Moss Landing. In Monterey at Wharf 2, there are around two, according to Laura Pratt, harbor assistant.
Between dock sales and specialized local seafood brokers like Real Good Fish, Eelman of Solstice Restaurant relies heavily on these entities to decide what to cook, shaping the menu. He prioritizes ocean-to-table dining, regularly monitoring availability to find the freshest catch that’s in season.
Customers, he notes, are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about what to ask for and enjoy.
The most popular items at Solstice include dishes with hyper-local rockfish, black cod, petrale sole and lingcod. “Rockfish is always extremely popular,” Eelman says. “We had a sardine dish in June and July – it was extremely popular.”
The sardine dish was a small plate with mighty flavor, featuring locally sourced smoked Monterey sardines marinated in escabeche sauce and paired with stone fruits like sweet nectarines, speckled with Espelette pepper.
Not all restaurants are so ingredient-driven, and oftentimes, the ones that are can be at a price point reserved for special occasions. But those that focus on the ingredients provide a message consumers can take with them. “We don’t try to dictate the ingredients, and we certainly don’t try to dictate the season,” Eelman says, adding that they look at the product, time and place and build a dish around that. And consumer spending goes a long way, say fishers, especially in the absence of crab and salmon.
“When you shop at these markets,” Deyerle says, “you help sustain the livelihoods of local fishers, encourage continued local fishing activity, and strengthen the overall economic health of the Monterey Bay fishing industry.”