A longtime fisherman works to revive traditions in
coastal communities
by DAN
SADOWSKY
To Scott Boley, the mid-1980s were the halcyon days of commercial fishing. Trolling for salmon along the shores of southern Oregon and northern California, Boley and his family made enough money during the summer months to sustain them for the entire year.
Since then, however, government restrictions on catches, industry consolidation and the growth of worldwide aquaculture have wiped out nearly three-quarters of the West Coast fishing fleet. More than just boats have been lost, says Boley. Traditional fishing values are disappearing, and the industry is losing its cultural relevance to communities up and down the Oregon coast.
Boley wants to reverse the tide. The 57-year-old former engineer and co-owner of the Fishermen Direct Seafood market in Gold Beach, Oregon is looking to drum up support for a new alliance of fishermen to revive a sense of pride and craftsmanship in the industry and celebrate the fishing heritage of coastal communities. He's still sketching out the details of the initiative, but likens it to the international Slow Food movement, which aims to celebrate and preserve the cultural traditions associated with locally grown foods. "That whole concept translates to coastal seafood," Boley says.
"I want to make fishing a more visible part of each community," he explains. "I'd like to see people get together and tell stories, generate publicity when fishing seasons start, and celebrate the fish we catch at community events."
To translate these ideas into reality, Boley will have to reckon with demographic shifts along the coast. Although the value of fish landed in Oregon ports hit a 16-year high in 2004, the state's commercial fishing industry accounted for fewer than 1,700 jobs, according to an estimate by the Oregon Employment Department.
"Today there are fewer interactions between the fishing community and population as a whole, partly because there are fewer fisherman," says Ralph Brown, a former salmon-boat owner and current Curry County commissioner. "But we've also changed. We're not truly rural anymore, in the sense of the occupations you now find here. We tend to be a lot of urban people living in small towns."
Ironically, Boley is counting on some of the south coast's newest residents to help celebrate one of its oldest industries. The region's population growth is fueled largely by wealthier retirees, who Boley believes are drawn partly by a coastal ambiance that only seafood restaurants, fishing boats and a working waterfront can foster. "When I ask new residents what brought them to Gold Beach, many of them mention fishing," agrees Molly Walker, a lifelong coastal resident and publisher of the Curry County Reporter.
Boley, who earned a master's degree in ocean engineering from Oregon State University, came to Gold Beach in the early 1970s. Soon after, a friend persuaded him to buy an old salmon troller, and he became such an ardent fisherman that not even the birth of his son in 1978 stopped the family's summer-long fishing excursions from San Francisco to Newport.
"The thing that really appealed to me about fishing was that you got paid by how hard you worked," says Boley. "It didn't matter how educated you were or how many degrees you had. If you were smart enough to stay out there and find a fish, you got paid for it."
Still, his engineering background came in handy when his colleagues needed a numbers guy to help protect their interests in the face of government salmon-management plans. In 1980, he and longtime fisherman David Satterly organized the Oregon Fisherman's Association to successfully fight plans for open-ocean salmon ranching. That led to a term on the US-Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty Southern Panel and then to six years on the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the agency responsible for regulating fisheries off the coast of California, Oregon and Washington."
"Scott's been a real activist," says Paul Heikkila, a fellow salmon troller employed by Sea Grant Extension, an OSU program to assist the local fishing industry. "He's got a lot of energy, he works hard, and he's been creative in carving out a niche with his retail business."
In the late 1990s, Boley and his fishermen-partners opened Fishermen Direct Seafood to be able to sell their catch without going through a middleman. The small, brightly lit retail area sells fresh, canned and frozen fish -- including salmon caught on Boley's 40-foot boat, Frances.
The market also supports local rockfish, lingcod and crab fishermen, who are offered better prices than from bigger distributors. Boley says he's able to get a premium price in his shop partly because of the work of groups like Portland-based Ecotrust, who have raised awareness about the importance of wild fish and worked to connect fishermen with markets for their catch.
Celebrating the local catch will be a big part of his yet-unnamed fishing alliance, Boley says. Cooking demonstrations, salmon bakes and fish sales can help revive interest in the trade. Among his other ideas: creating awards for the best-looking boats, publishing the fish tales of veteran trollers, offering dockside demonstrations of how a salmon troller works or how halibut are caught, and organizing festivals that coincide with the opening of the various fishing seasons.
His next step is organizing a "nucleus of fishermen" at each of three or four coastal ports. Then he plans to seek grant funding to hire an organizer who can help generate publicity and momentum. He says he already has received support for his ideas among fishermen.
"They think they're participating in a pretty neat industry - there's not much pay in it, but there are other rewards, and they like to think they're part of something ongoing and sustainable. This is about preserving those traditions."
Dan Sadowsky is a Portland-based writer. This article was supported in part by Ecotrust.