a day ago
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
California's fishermen are struggling. Is this tiny catch their last big chance?
From the cockpit of his 63-foot fishing boat in Monterey Bay, Porter McHenry is on the hunt for what might be the last lucrative catch in California — though competitors and tariffs are closing in on his profit.
To spot his prey, he scrutinizes the behavior of seabirds, the patterns on his sonar screens and especially the tell-tale movements of the boats around him. His tiny target: California market squid, sometimes called Monterey squid, each 6 inches and 10 arms of opalescent white and purple.
With salmon season closed for three years in a row and Dungeness crab season dramatically shortened, squid is now the only species in the state that still holds the promise of a massive payday for struggling fishermen. 'A good crab season, you could probably gross $3… $400,000,' said McHenry. 'Squid here, you could gross well over a million.'
But when squid season opened in late April, there was no mad dash for the first catch. Instead, with Chinese tariffs threatening the price, a standoff ensued. Fishermen refused to fish, and their local processors, who buy and freeze their catch for transport, refused to offer a high price in an industry reliant on exports.
The vast majority of all squid caught in the U.S. is shipped abroad, with the largest portion caught in California and sent to China. Last year, China purchased some $113 million worth of squid from the U.S. — 64% of the exported product.
That makes today's tariffs particularly ominous for squid fishermen. 'It's just the uncertainty,' said McHenry. During a 2018 trade dispute, China temporarily stopped buying U.S. squid altogether. Even after the U.S. and China agreed in early May to substantially lower their tariffs on each other, the price of squid stayed down 25% from last year.
There's an ongoing effort to sell more market squid to local buyers, bypassing tariffs and expanding the niche market for squid that stays in California. Michelin-starred restaurants like San Francisco's Kin Khao are already on board, offering diners some of the freshest, most tender squid caught in the U.S.
But China remains the No. 1 customer, and this year, fishermen like McHenry could face even fiercer competition in an industry that is cutthroat even in times of economic peace.
'If I went and caught five tons of squid tonight, by the morning, everybody in the industry would know that I'd caught five tons of squid, and probably where I caught it,' said McHenry. 'The amount of espionage is incredible.'
The games begin
Squid season starts with a rumor. Around April, the cephalapods return to their favored spawning grounds in Monterey Bay. Until then, fishermen like McHenry wait impatiently, passing the time by working on their boats until they catch wind of a recreational fisherman who has spotted a shoal, or a halibut fisherman reports that his catch have mouths full of squid guts.
News travels fast in this small community. Last year, just 72 boats brought in the season's 126 million pounds of squid. And getting into the squid fleet is its own competition: With a fixed number of permits, each with a one-time cost of about $900,000, the only way in is to wait until someone else retires or sells a coveted permit. But 72 can feel like a lot when a few dozen 60-foot vessels are crisscrossing paths as they furiously search for fortune.
On April 23, after weeks of anticipation, word spread that a fisherman in Monterey found 50 tons of squid. That should have marked the opening of the season. Instead, when he brought his catch to a processor expecting $1,200 per ton, they offered $800, citing concern over the impact of tariffs.
The rest of the fleet decided not to fish until a price was settled. But solidarity is fragile when every day spent waiting is a day of income lost. On April 29, local processors offered several of the fishermen in Monterey $900 per ton, which they accepted. Squid season had begun.
Dropping an anchor
Rather than broadcast their deal, the Monterey fishermen seized the advantage. They used their head start to deploy one of the most powerful moves in squid fishing: dropping an anchor.
A dropped anchor is effectively a force field — no other boat is supposed to fish within an eighth of a nautical mile of an anchored boat. 'That's where the competitive nature of the squid fishery comes in,' said Frank Sousa, McHenry's fishing partner. 'You've got to be kind of aggressive in trying to find the right spot, and guys will try to push other people off their eighths, or try to get as much room as they can get in the best area.'
Sometimes, a massive shoal of squid picks a spot to spawn and doesn't move. When that happens, the first one to drop anchor in the right place can keep their boat there for weeks, hauling up hundreds of tons from their untouchable supply.
The cavernous belly of McHenry's boat can hold 120,000 pounds of squid, enough to fill four semitrucks at the dock. When he's found squid, he unrolls the massive seine net bolted to his deck, unspooling it like a giant web of thread, then uses it to encircle up to 80,000 pounds of prey, cinching it at the bottom to trap them. Almost every squid fisherman also employs a smaller secondary vessel, called a light boat, which shines bright lights into the water at night, attracting squid to their capture like moths to a flame.
But squid are unpredictable. Just as easily as they settle on a spot, they can drift away, out of your eighth and into the next boat's. 'It's a chess game with a moving board,' said Sousa.
Looking for clues
Out on the ocean, sometimes for days on end, fishermen pass the time tuned into the same radio frequencies and talking on group calls. Even if a captain finds squid miles away from the nearest boat, chatty workers at the unloading docks and processing facilities make it nearly impossible to keep a secret. 'Everybody's got, you know, spies out,' said McHenry.
There are clues to the squid's whereabouts on board, as well. McHenry's $14,000 sonar system scans the water around and below him for sea life. 'These are little pieces of squid,' he said, pointing to red, Rorschach-like blotches on a blue sonar screen. 'Four or five ton, maybe.' Tall and always dressed for a chilly night out on the ocean, McHenry is a second-generation Half Moon Bay fisherman, and he uses his historic knowledge of preferred spawning grounds and knowledge of habitat features like fathom curves to track his targets.
'The fishermen probably know more than any scientist about when the squid move in and how long they stay on the spawning beds,' said William Gilly, a professor at Stanford who has studied the physiology and behavior of squid for more than 40 years, catching thousands of market squid specimens in Monterey Bay.
A big appetite
For as long as he's been researching them, Gilly has been ordering squid at restaurants. Most of the time when he sees 'Monterey squid' on the menu, 'it's blatantly obvious that it's not Monterey squid … they'll be a quarter-inch thick, and Monterey squid mantles don't get that thick,' he said, referring to its body. Once, when Gilly was conducting research in La Paz, Mexico, he ordered what the restaurant assured him was market squid from California. Doubtful, he brought the dish back to his lab and tested the squid's DNA; it was Chinese.
China is both a source and destination for squid because it processes more squid than any other country. When McHenry started squid fishing with his father in 2001, they earned $250 per ton. Today, thanks to buyers in China, he can make five times that.
'Asian countries have always liked this smaller squid because it's similar to what they have,' said Diane Pleschner-Steele, who spent nearly two decades as the executive director of the nonprofit California Wetfish Producers Association. The original squid fishermen in Monterey Bay were Chinese immigrants, pushed out of other, more profitable fisheries in the late 1800s, and fishing by night with torches to attract their catch.
While countries halfway across the globe are clamoring for California's squid, Pleschner-Steele said it's been more of a challenge to find buyers close to home. And even if the U.S. appetite for market squid were stronger, there are few processing facilities here, and the U.S. can't compete with China's low cost of labor. Ultimately, it can be cheaper to send squid on a 12,000-mile round trip than to process it domestically. The irony is calamari rings consumed in the U.S. may have been caught here, shipped to China for processing, then shipped back.
Keeping it local
Still, the domestic market for squid has increased in recent years. At Japanese restaurant Rintaro, on the northern edge of San Francisco's Mission district, chef and owner Sylvan Mishima Brackett buys unprocessed squid wholesale from Monterey Fish Market at Pier 33 after it's trucked from Monterey.
Brackett honed his instinct for ingredients while training in Japan and serving as the creative director at Berkeley's Chez Panisse. He likes the fresh, clean flavor of the market squid, and has made the small, delicate species the star of one of Rintaro's signature dishes, ika no nuta, for which it is poached, marinated in vegetable oil, and mixed with mustardy miso sauce and vegetables.
With no cost for pre-processing, he said the squid is 'really cheap.' On his most recent order sheet, it cost $6.95 a pound, the same price as Manila clams from Washington and far less than the halibut that cost him $12 per pound. But it takes work. 'Cleaning squid is not, you know, super fun, but you just do it,' Brackett said. Five pounds of squid takes his team about 20 minutes to clean, debeak, and prepare for cooking.
Brackett's outlook is rare. The most recent Fisheries of the United States Report, compiled by NOAA, estimated that 75%-90% of all seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported, the flip side of the roughly 80% of seafood caught in the U.S. that is exported.
That's disappointing to some fishermen like Sousa. 'I wish that a lot of our seafood here was utilized more here,' said Sousa. 'But, you know, what it comes down to is we're trying to survive and support our families, and if shipping overseas is our best option, then I'm 100% okay with it.'
Down in Monterey Bay on June 4, he and McHenry unloaded a small batch of squid through a tube at the dock. It hadn't been a great start to the season, but they found a decent spot around 3 a.m., and by the time the sun had warmed the walkways of the wharf, they'd caught 6 tons. This year's squid are bigger than last year's, about 10 per pound, which McHenry said signals a healthy ocean — and the potential for better fishing in the coming weeks.
'We've got that ever optimistic hope that it will get good,' he said.
