From crisis to comeback: How a tiny nonprofit is working to save Monterey Bay’s fishing industry

On a Tuesday evening in February, servers drifted through a crowd gathered inside Hook & Line restaurant in Santa Cruz with trays of crisp, round croquettes stuffed with sweet Dungeness crab, and smoked rockfish tostadas topped with serrano chile-infused creme fraiche and fragrant fried garlic. 

Chef Santos Majano was just warming the engine for a meal that would highlight seafood harvested from Monterey Bay. A squid salad exploded with punchy flavors of lime and Thai chilis that threatened to burst from your eardrums, tempered with cooling bites of cucumber, apple and fresh herbs. For the entree, large filets of crisp-skinned black cod crowned a generous pile of roasted winter root vegetables – parsnips, turnips and rutabagas – and almond-scented basmati rice, over which guests spooned a rich housemade red curry. 

This was one of nine fundraising events in the “Get Hooked” dinner series to support the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. The events, held throughout Santa Cruz and Monterey counties at elite locations such as Michelin-starred Chez Noir in Carmel-by-the-Sea and inside the tasting room at Madson Wines in Santa Cruz with chef Diego Felix, run through November. The cost of a ticket varies from $75 to $150, depending on the venue. 

The events have three purposes: to raise money for the trust’s Monterey Bay Community Seafood Program, which purchases sustainably harvested seafood from local fishers at market rate and distributes it to community members in need of food assistance; to connect consumers who love seafood with local fishers in attendance at each event; and to build relationships between restaurants and fishers, hopefully inspiring chefs to use more locally sourced seafood on their menus. 

For the past 10 years, the trust has helped to rebuild the local fishing industry, while simultaneously protecting the ecosystems in Monterey Bay. With a background in marine science, executive director Melissa Mahoney leads the tiny, three-person nonprofit, and since 2022 has expanded the trust’s influence and aid to fishers and the community throughout the region. 

Halfway through the meal at Hook & Line, Mahoney addressed the crowd of about 60 diners. “It’s not just a meal; it’s a movement,” she said, referring to prioritizing sourcing seafood from the Central Coast. “Now, more than ever, it’s important to build community and protect our local food systems.”

Over the past decade, environmental concerns such as whale entanglement and declining salmon populations have plunged the fishing industry in Monterey Bay into a state of crisis. In Santa Cruz County, the number of active fishers has dwindled to fewer than 20, down from over 100 in the 1990s. At this sensitive time, the trust has become a critical bridge between the remaining fishers and the local economy.

In an era of few wins for the fishing industry, the trust’s success is growing. With partners such as Second Harvest Food Bank, the trust’s community seafood program has tripled the amount of locally caught fish provided to needy families in the past two years. This year, it’s working with data scientists and economists to see how it can replace infrastructure that was lost over the past two decades as the industry waned, like seafood buyers and harbor facilities for processing and distributing fish, and grow it for the future – all while prioritizing the health of Monterey Bay. 

If environmentalism and a strong fishing economy seem opposed, 20 years ago, when the trust’s director, Mahoney, was getting her start as a fisheries researcher, she would have agreed with you. “I thought [fishers] were the bad guys,” she said. “As I started to talk with them, learn from them and engage them in research projects, I realized how incredibly knowledgeable they are about the resource, and how important their knowledge is for getting at the sustainability of how we use the ocean resources.”

Mahoney grew up in western Colorado, but said she knew from a young age that she would work by the ocean. After graduating from the University of Colorado, she came to Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and earned her master’s degree in marine science. She wanted to study sharks, but in the late 1990s, the West Coast, including Monterey Bay, was grappling with the collapse of the groundfish fishery due to overfishing. 

From the 1970s to the late 1990s, Monterey Bay’s most important fishery was groundfish, a term that includes species like rockfish, sanddabs and flounders. They were fished by dragging heavy nets strung between two boats along the bottom of the ocean. This method, known as trawling, caught anything and everything it its way, not just groundfish. 

“That was the backbone of U.S. West Coast fisheries until the late ‘90s, when the rockfish stocks started plummeting. Scientists started realizing that [rockfish] were longer-lived and slow growing, and that they couldn’t handle the kind of fishing pressure that was being put on them,” said Mahoney. 

At the time, most of the research money available to recent graduates like Mahoney was for studying rockfish. She leaned into the opportunity, and wrote her master’s thesis on the age and growth of blackgill rockfish. During her research, she began working with fishers, and those relationships altered the trajectory of her career. “That really changed my whole outlook on sustainability and conservation,” she said. “I wanted to work for organizations that were integrating fishermen’s knowledge, not trying to cut them out.”

By 2013, thanks to intense support from environmental groups and changes to the fishing industry, such as strict limitations on trawling, removing some fishing vessels, and the introduction of a quota system to control the number of fish being pulled out of the water, the groundfish population in Monterey Bay bounced back. But the City of Monterey had a new problem: how to entice fishers to return to fish for groundfish once again, and support the few fishers that remained from the once-booming industry. 

The Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust was founded to support this goal, and Mahoney was hired to help build the fledgling nonprofit. The process brought together leaders from the fishing, conservation and science communities to create an organization that would act as a bridge between having healthy oceans and sustainable seafood, and hopefully bring back a robust fishing community, she said. 

Over the past 10 years, the trust’s on-the-ground work has shifted depending on the needs of fishers. For example, if someone wants to learn how to do off-the-boat sales or more direct marketing, the trust will help them figure out how to do that in a way that works for them. After 2016, whale entanglements in fishing gear threatened the lucrative Dungeness crab fishery, and the trust worked with the California Department of Fish & Wildlife to pay fishers to collect and return abandoned gear from the water before it could harm sea life. 

During the pandemic, the trust used an $80,000 grant to establish the Community Seafood Program to support fishers struggling to get their catch to market. For two years, the grant allowed the trust to purchase seafood at market rate from local fishers, and deliver it to food relief organizations throughout the region, including Pajaro Valley Loaves and Fishes, the Food Bank for Monterey County and Meals on Wheels of the Monterey Peninsula.

In 2022, the grant money ran out, and the community seafood program struggled to stay afloat. That’s when Mahoney came on as executive director, and founded the Get Hooked dinner series to help save the program. That first year, the trust held six events. In 2023 and 2024, it held seven, and expanded to nine events in 2025. 

In 2023, with a boost from a $20,000 grant provided by the UNFI Foundation, a nonprofit that supports food equity and sustainability, the seafood program partnered with its first big organization in Santa Cruz County, Second Harvest Food Bank. Beginning in January 2024, with the help of an additional $10,000 in purchasing power from a private donor, the trust delivered thousands of pounds of grenadier filets, a white fish that tastes similar to cod, to Second Harvest to be distributed to local families. 

Additionally, grenadiers are often accidentally caught by fishers while fishing for black cod, but there isn’t much of a market for it on the West Coast. Purchasing this incidental catch from fishers helps create another income stream for them, explained Mahoney. 

A year in, the partnership with Second Harvest is so successful that the food bank is exploring how to use its own funds to purchase other species. “It’s getting more popular with their clients to have fish. That is a wonderful outcome of the program,” said Mahoney. 

Between the grants and donations from the Get Hooked dinners, the trust more than tripled the number of seafood meals it has provided between 2022 and 2024, said Mahoney. This year, the UNFI Foundation indicated that it may continue to support the seafood program. If another grant is finalized, Mahoney plans to use the funds to partner with another need-based organization in Santa Cruz County.

While the seafood program continues to grow, the trust’s work is far from over. This year, it’s also working to bring back some of the local fishing industry infrastructure that was lost in the early 2000s in the wake of the groundfish disaster. 

There are a lot of middlemen who facilitate getting fish to a consumer, and without that infrastructure, the industry will continue to struggle. There’s no consistent seafood buyer on the wharf in Monterey, Mahoney points out. There are three buyers in Moss Landing: Lusamerica, Sea Harvest Fish Market and Real Good Fish. Monterey Fish Company also purchases anchovies, squid and sardines seasonally. But there’s no consistent ice production or facility, which is crucial for keeping fish fresh, and, with only one public hoist, unloading boats can be slow. The Santa Cruz Harbor has one dedicated seafood buyer, H&H Fresh Fish Co.

A thriving fishing community needs multiple buyers, multiple sizes of boats and diversity of gears, and the flexibility of fishers to move in and around the different fisheries and seasons, said Mahoney. She believes that training people to work in these industries and giving them job opportunities in each of the ports could create a stronger, more sustainable seafood economy.

The trust launched a new initiative this year, the Future of Blue project, in partnership with statewide nonprofit Regenerative California, to start addressing these issues. It has already received funding to hire a fisheries data scientist and resource economists to identify what infrastructure is needed based on Monterey Bay fisheries’ current and possible future output. “What do we need to do to realize our full potential out here in the bay? How do we protect it?” said Mahoney. 

She describes the goals of the Future of Blue as “a dream come true” for her, both personally and professionally. “It’s about revitalizing our working waterfronts, not just a fishery or group, and building a positive future with good, robust data,” said Mahoney. The Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust might not have the answers, but it can be the “convening force,” she said. “We have the capacity to envision a future that we want to move towards together, beyond the survival mentality and the scarcity mindset that we’re all in right now.”

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