Khevin Mellegers, F/V Areona

Fisherman

Photo courtesy of TrimTab Media.

While the commercial fishing industry often attracts those with an independent spirit, creativity, and a sense of entrepreneurship, few embody these traits as fully as Santa Cruz fisherman Khevin Mellegers. Commercial fishing is more than an occupation; it becomes a lifestyle that oscillates from intense work to ample downtime, with constant tinkering all the while.

“It’s the best damn office anyone can possibly have. You have a lot of freedom, and it’s like the world stops when you’re on the ocean,” Mellegers says. “You’re your own boss...well, you and Mother Nature.”

Mellegers, 48, has fished for a variety of species and has owned more than a dozen boats since he first started fishing commercially in 2005, but he currently fishes for sablefish and Dungeness crab on the F/V Areona, a 30-foot Nova Scotia lobster boat. He also trolled for king salmon until recently, selling his other boat and the salmon permit with it.

Growing up in Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Mellegers fell in love with fishing and the water, but turning that love into a career wasn’t part of his early plans. He moved north and attended Humboldt State University, where he studied education and worked as a river guide during the summer.

Upon graduation in 2001, Mellegers didn’t turn to teaching and instead started a tackle shop and a soft bait fishing lure manufacturing company with a friend called Mad River Outfitters and Mad River Manufacturing. He taught himself how to create plaster molds for lures like soft-plastic grubs, twin-tail scampis, and worms. The physical manufacturing process wasn’t the most difficult learning curve, he says, but rather things like buying UPCs for all his products. 

“My mom’s an artist, and my dad’s an engineer. When I was a kid, I started tying flies, plucking feathers out of my mom’s cowboy hat,” he says. “I’ve always enjoyed being creative.”

But a brick and mortar shop at a time when the internet was beginning to take off didn’t make for easy business for Mellegers, who turned to the sea to supplement his income in 2005. He purchased an 18-foot Klamath aluminum boat with his business partner and set out to catch sablefish — with a rod and reel. (For those unfamiliar with species profiles and fishing methods, sablefish are deep-water fish and are almost always harvested with longlines and traps.)

Even though they caught around two-dozen on their first trip, plucking up individual sablefish from hundreds of feet below the ocean surface was not the most efficient use of their time. Soon after they fashioned a longline for themselves, figuring it out — often with non-traditions methods — as they went along. Case-in-point: They began pulling in their longline, with around 360 hooks set 600-700 feet deep, by hand during their first trips before buying an electric hauler.

While his tackle shop and manufacturing company were still operating, he began to expand his fisheries to lingcod, salmon, and albacore, among others. He also obtained a permit to buy and sell fish and created direct markets for his catch in Humboldt County in 2007.

“It got to the point where I enjoyed fishing more than the other business,” Mellegers says. So he closed the tackle shop, sold his share of the manufacturing business, moved back down to Santa Cruz with his wife Michelle, and joined the Monterey Bay fleet in 2011. The two now live in Felton with their two sons, Ayden, 9, and Lucas, 5.