The last frontier remains the sea. Lone fishermen still set forth in small boats
in the darkness before dawn to brave the mysteries of the briny deep, forgoing
the security of regular hours and a steady paycheck to coax an uncertain living
from the ocean.
"You have a freedom out
there that doesn't exist anymore in American society," said Zeke Grader,
executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.
"It's extremely challenging,
hard work. You have to be good at a number of skills, from being a diesel
mechanic to being a radio operator, not to mention operating the fishing gear.
But you are your own boss."
"It's a hard life,"
said Mike Mitchell, 39, the burly captain of a 50-foot commercial fishing vessel
at Fisherman's Wharf in
Every now and then, one of the
boats doesn't come back. Then after a while, maybe some wreckage washes up on a
beach somewhere. Maybe not. It's part of the price of business.
More often than that, as men slip
around on wet, pitching decks, injury occurs. "It's real easy to lose a
finger out there," said one fisherman. But he makes a point of not talking
about the physical risks of his trade to his wife. "I don't want her to
worry."
Commercial fishermen pit hard-won
skills against the vagaries of wind, tide and weather in a guessing game aimed
at a prey that may be found in bountiful numbers one minute and vanish the next.
Then, if they are lucky enough to
have fish or crab on ice in the hold, they hurry back to port to find what price
has been ordained by the law of supply and demand.
"The prices change
overnight," Mitchell said. "Salmon can go from $1.50 a pound to
$2.25." Prices can drop just as fast if the fish are running and rival
skippers have a hot hand.
Depending on your boat, your
skill and your luck, you could find yourself eligible for food stamps or hounded
by salesmen with opportunities to shelter your taxable income.
Nobody keeps track, but Grader
guesses the average annual income of a commercial fisherman at the wharf ranges
between $25,000 and $65,000. The high end of the scale probably touches
$100,000, he figures. The bigger your boat is, the longer you can stay out at
sea and the greater your chances of bringing home the goods.
Mitchell, who has been a
commercial fisherman for 18 years, is an example of the sort of plainspoken salt
you find working out of Fisherman's Wharf. He believes there are quite enough
commercial fishermen and worries that media attention can only bring more into
the field, further complicating his life.
"What's in this for
me?" he demanded. Mitchell, whose nickname, "Candy," suggests
another side to his personality, bridled at answering questions about the
economics of his trade.
"It's none of the public's
business," he said.
Mitchell begins the year fishing
for herring, a species that used to be considered trash fish. The Japanese,
however, regard the eggs of the female as a great delicacy and buy all that is
caught. A permit is needed to net herring, and Fish and Game wardens close the
season when the quota is met.
The herring are caught in
Mitchell's two 65-fathom nets, each costing $1,000. Or they are not caught.
"Some boat might get 20 tons in a single night and the guy with the boat in
the next berth doesn't get anything," said Bob Miller, 59, who has
skippered a 25-footer for 10 years.
The commercial fleet fishes for
salmon from May to September, sometimes traveling several hours off the coast to
find where the fish are biting.
"You leave at 3 in the
morning, sometimes in order to be fishing by dawn, and you don't get home until
10 at night," said Miller, who was a real estate broker before turning to
fishing.
Sometimes, Mitchell groused, he
will return to port with 1,000 pounds of salmon in his hold. People eye that,
multiply the pounds by whatever price salmon fetches, and assume he's getting
rich fast.
"They don't realize,"
he says, "the days when I don't catch anything."
This article, excerpted here,
originally ran in The Chronicle on
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Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/02/PKGDOILTDK1.DTL