Although she said she didn’t want to paint a gloomy picture of the West Coast’s fishing industry, the reality for Ronnie Pellegrini is a nearly 100-year-old family livelihood that is marked with many ups and downs.

With spiraling fuel costs and increasing restrictions, there have been more downs in recent years.

A “perfect storm” season last year that saw no local commercial salmon fishery, as well as meager crab and albacore catches, have landed Pellegrini, along with her husband Paul and their two daughters, in a financial lurch.

Pellegrini, who is also a Harbor District commissioner, talked about the fishing industry during a presentation to the Humboldt Taxpayers’ League at the Samoa Cookhouse Wednesday afternoon.

Pellegrini, whose family is three years away from having fished out of Humboldt Bay for a century, told the HTA members about declining fish, increasing regulations and the disappearance of key infrastructure.

But there is an even more troubling trend playing out.

Several years ago, Pellegrini said she was contracted by the albacore trade group Western Fishboat Owners Association to conduct an albacore economic survey for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The survey indicated the average age of the commercial albacore fishermen was 57 years old.

“What it means is there are no new entrants in the fishing industry,” Pellegrini said. “There will not likely be a next generation of commercial fishermen.”

Pellegrini also chronicled some of the changes the fishing industry has seen since her husband Paul’s great-grandfather began fishing from Humboldt Bay in 1910.

Beginning in the 1970s, Pellegrini said, the U.S. government established a 200-mile offshore limit to exclude foreign fishing vessels from U.S. waters and established federal fisheries management councils to manage important fish species within those territorial waters.

The government also offered a glut of federal low- or no-interest loans to boost the U.S. fishing fleet to compete globally, she said.

“The problem was the industry got really good at catching fish,” Pellegrini said.

Fisheries science had not caught up with emerging technology that made fishermen more efficient, and Pellegrini said for fish species like the yellow-eye rockfish, which can reach ages of 100 years, researchers didn’t realize that it would take so long to rebuild over-fished stocks.

Along with declining fish, the fleet buildup in the 1970s had impacts on the markets in the 1980s, which Pellegrini said saw the price of fish plummet, such as black cod, which sank from $1 to 28 cents per pound.

The effects on the industry, which saw a decline in fishing industry businesses and infrastructure, led to fishermen having fewer options if they survived in the business at all.

But Pellegrini, and other fishing families, are hopeful that the development of the Eureka Fisherman’s Terminal and its three cranes will offer more options and opportunities to maximize their catches.