Quick Take
A new report from the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust finds that the number of commercial fishing vessels based in Monterey Bay has fallen more than 70% since the 1980s, while changing environmental conditions have reshaped what and how fishers catch.
A Monterey Bay nonprofit recently released an historic report on the state of the area’s fishing industry, offering data that takes a closer look at tidal shifts to fisheries, number of boats and infrastructure at the Monterey, Moss Landing and Santa Cruz harbors.
The nonprofit Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust produced the Monterey Bay Commercial Fisheries: Status and Trends Report with help from researchers at UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. It looked at data on fishing activity from 1981 to 2024, with a detailed focus on the past 14 years, and released the findings earlier this month.
The report outlines substantial changes to fishing strategies and types of fisheries, and a huge decline in the number of vessels throughout Monterey Bay. It notes that each port could make specific improvements to its infrastructure to support the industry, from installing public ice machines and access to cold storage to establishing regular onsite seafood markets.
The data also paints a picture of resilience, with fishers adapting to changing environmental conditions and maintaining Monterey Bay as a prominent fishing hub in the state.
“Each port hosts commercial fisheries, but each of them have a distinct history and their own character,” said Melissa Mahoney, executive director of Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust.
The number of fishing vessels overall has decreased sharply over the past four decades. In the 1980s, around 1,100 boats listed Monterey, Moss Landing or Santa Cruz as their home port. Between 2010 to 2024, the annual average was 313 vessels, a drop of more than 70%. The report doesn’t distinguish how many active fishers there are, or how many are full- and part-time.
Meanwhile, landings — when a boat comes into a harbor with fish — and their value don’t follow the same trajectory.
“They are quite volatile, and that can be positive or negative. But that increasing volatility generally means more uncertainty for business planning efforts,” said Mahoney.
Although Santa Cruz is the smallest of the three harbors in terms of volume, it supports more commercial fishing boats than Moss Landing or Monterey.
Built in 1964, Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor’s relatively shallow depth — between 14 and 20 feet — can’t accommodate enormous commercial fishing boats like Moss Landing and Monterey can. Most Santa Cruz fishers are small, independent operations that focus on high price-per-pound fish; namely, Chinook salmon and Dungeness crab.
In contrast, huge quantities of squid brought in by fewer large vessels make up the bulk of total fish volume brought into Moss Landing and Monterey.
The smaller size of Santa Cruz fishers’ boats and businesses allowed them to adapt somewhat nimbly when its traditional fisheries were dramatically restricted.
The state canceled the commercial salmon season in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and opened under strict quotas in 2026. Before 2019, the Dungeness crab season traditionally started in late November, and crab sold at a premium for holiday feasts. Since 2021, the season has opened after Christmas due to interactions with whales, which can become entangled in the fishing lines. The later start was an economic blow that eliminated the lucrative holiday season.
With its most important fisheries in flux, Santa Cruz fishers are leaning on the other species. The report shows that Santa Cruz brings in the most diverse harvest in Monterey Bay.
Dungeness crab is still caught in the winter, but hook-and-line caught halibut and sea bass made up substantial portions of overall landings in 2023 and 2024, perhaps as a replacement for salmon. Fishers also caught smaller amounts of sablefish, finfish like anchovies, albacore tuna and other groundfish like rockfish and lingcod.
The ways that fishers are bringing their catch to market are also changing. H&H Fresh Fish Co. is the only dedicated seafood buyer in Santa Cruz, and the majority of commercial boats sell to it. But there’s evidence that many fishers create additional opportunities by obtaining business licenses to handle and sell their own catch directly to consumers or businesses.
Establishing a dockside seafood market would allow the catch to be readily available to customers, the report advises.
As climate change continues to impact the ocean, Santa Cruz’s adaptability could be its advantage. Its most lucrative traditional fisheries – Chinook salmon and Dungeness crab – are also the most biologically vulnerable, which means continuing to prioritize less environmentally sensitive species like halibut, rockfish and spot prawns is likely to give fishers more stability.
Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust will dig into the findings and nuances of the report and receive input from fishers and other industry members at several meetings this fall.
The report’s data quantifies Monterey Bay fishers’ anecdotal experiences, said Mahoney. “I doubt it’s news to anyone with boots on the ground or a boat in the water,” she said. “After navigating a cascading series of closures and delays to local salmon and Dungeness crab fisheries in recent years, I’m guessing that many fishermen have reached the same conclusions from their own experience.”
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