The La Jolla Report: Big Takeaways from MREP West Coast
By Mark C Anderson, November 10, 2025
Dan Wolford speaking with participant during mock council
The drama is high, the anticipation alive in the air.
Commercial fishermen, rec fishermen, ecologists and government officials and other stakeholders, who all gathered for 2025’s West Coast Marine Resources Education Program, are all ready to leap into an intense simulated Pacific Fisheries Management Council.
Then—before the mock council can begin—someone calls for a halt.
Dan Wolford, who’s a former council member chair, longtime fisherman and also an engineer and conservationist, asks for a pause.
He wants the room to consider the oath that all real-life councilmembers take.
The oath reads, in part, “[A]s a duly appointed member of a Regional Fishery Management Council…[I] hereby promise to conserve and manage the living marine resources of the United States of America…for the greatest overall benefit of the Nation.
“I recognize my responsibility to serve as a knowledgeable and experienced trustee of the Nation’s marine fisheries resources, being careful to balance competing private or regional interests, and always aware and protective of the public interest.”
Wolford’s point lands: This training has real stakes. MREP provides tools for fishermen to have a helpful—and influential—say in how they get to fish.
As one presenter put it, “No civic body has more power than the fishery councils.”
The oath also works as a good introduction to other takeaways from MREP West Coast, which happens annually, with Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust providing input on the steering committee and providing scholarships for area fishers to attend. (The conference, food and lodging included, is free for accepted applicants.)
As the Trust previously reported with an MREP deep dive, “Fisheries Management Is Complicated. Here’s How Fishermen Are Helping,” the MREP main plot is four-fold:
1) Learn the “nuts and bolts” of marine fisheries science and management;
2) Demystify acronyms and vocabulary;
3) Gain tools and insights into effective engagement in regional Fishery Management Councils;
4) Connect with key regional fishery science and management experts.
WIth that in mind, lessons that emerged across a dynamic and deeply educational week follow here:
The Council wants to help!
Maybe the most helpful takeaway is the simplest one: The PFMC wants your input.
That gets at the fundamental goal of MREP, which is to empower fishermen—who have so much on-the-water wisdom—to resist being intimidated by an exhausting and bureaucratic management process; and contribute powerful insight to an inexact, albeit science-based, policy; and take a proverbial seat at the table instead of finding themselves on it.
Oregon-based commercial fisherman, Pacific Council member and conference moderator Poggy Lapham put it in his own words during an MREP session on how doers like him can help.
“It’s, ‘Hey, look at us as fishermen, who have a giant sample size of data,'” he said. “We have data around weather, gear types, fish populations and locations and a lot more—all things scientists don’t do every single day like we do. If we can’t help inform how those regulations are set, they’re going to be set by people who aren’t involved and don’t have a handle on applicability.
“I don’t want people telling me what, for instance, my gear should look like when they haven’t been out on a boat.”
And, yes, this stuff is complex. (It does take hours to start to explain it to professional fishermen who have made their careers on the water.)
That inspired Pacific Coast Fisheries Management Executive Director Merrick Burden to platform a key point: The agency’s experts, who have dedicated their careers to figuring out how it all works, want to make complicated easy.
Staff like Kerry Griffin, who led a variety of educational sessions at West Coast MREP, are eager to guide fishermen through the council matrix.
“Pick up the phone,” Burden said. “They’d love to talk to you.”
MREP program coordinator Lauren O’Brien helped emphasize why that’s important: “Fishermen’s voices are hugely important to make this system work.”
Reach PFMC via 503-820-2280.
Alexander Stubbs with a “slinky pot”
Slinkies are for more than staircases.
There is no shortage of crises the ocean and our local fishing community are facing, as I’ve laid out in stories like “Near Death Diagnosis: Haunting reports on the fragility of remaining local fishers”
So it’s nice to encounter a novel solution that mixes eco-savvy design with good business. This one came as part of an afternoon circuit on new techniques to fish smarter, with ideas conjured by active fisherfolk.
This one has a catchy nickname that’s also accurate: “slinky pots.”
Fish Tech founder Alexander Stubbs developed the traps, actual name Cod Coils, to be super lightweight and collapse to a fraction of the size of traditional heavy and cumbersome predecessors.
A regular Pacific cod pot checks in at 500 pounds. A “Slinky” weighs 12.
Stubs came up with the idea as a dedicated hook-and-line fisherman on a small boat in California.
“I wanted to fish pots, but my boat was too small, so I came up with the slinky, and they worked,” he told National Fisherman.
Now, where one traditional trap would fit, he can squeeze in 50 collapsible versions, which also help reduce bycatch.
“It’s clean fishing,” he says.
More at facebook.com/fishtechinc.
Chef Davin Waite cutting into a bigeye tuna
Whole fish = holistic fish = smart fish sales.
Davin Waite, if you ask fishermen and seafood chefs, is about as real as they come.
He’s also a chef who’s won prestigious James Beard Awards he cares little about, compared to how much he cares who caught his fish and how to use the whole creature.
That adds sea cred to what he did in front of the MREP audience to help open the conference.
With the help of his cook, a chef knife and a shallow wood grill, he cleaned a huge bigeye tuna tip to tip with ninja speed, turning it into a multicourse meal, while honoring the audience.
“You all here can clean a fish better than me,” he said. “So this is more of a marketing lesson than a fish cutting demo.”
The co-owner/operator of landmark Oceanside spots Wrench & Rodent Seabasstropub and Shootz Fish & Beer proceeded to demo how to use the entirety of a beautiful locally landed fish—including its heart, bone marrow, liver and even fins, bones and scales—to reduce waste and increase return, which serves as a selling point for fishermen to present to buyers.
“There are no bad cuts of meat if you’re using right,” he said, and then promptly backed it up, even sauteeing the eyeballs that give bigeye its name.
That reminded me that eyeballs are a delicacy in many food cultures, and—to take it to a raw nature-based place—something predators eat first.
So I kept my eye on the eyeballs.
“[This process] is not a cheap restaurant owner thing, it’s a respect for the ingredient,” Waite continued. “Let’s learn more and apply it…all this food and all these parts of the fish [are] more crayons for the box.”
After he wrapped his demo, I went on an eyeball hunt. My plan was to leverage trying one into getting MREP’s O’Brien to do the same.
She seemed hesitant, but picked up the plate with the two racketball sized orbs on it.
Then she “accidentally” let one fall. It dropped from the flimsy plate so fast I could only react.
My hand shot out to catch it midair. Which meant, of course, now I had to eat it, and my leverage evaporated.
But we did test them out, and the tender, rich, and almost sweetbread-like muscles around the sclera—“the cookie dough!” Waite said—were as tasty as he promised.
More at allthingswaite.com.
Fishermen science is a huge help.
Jamie Diamond, owner of Stardust Sportfishing
One of the moderators for the week is also a business owner, fisherwoman, fisher-kid mom (times three) and a newer member of the Pacific Council.
Diamond owns Stardust Sportfishing with her husband Capt. Jason Diamond and is also CEO/general manager of Santa Barbara Landing, home to sportfishing, whale watching, SCUBA, guided kayak and snorkel trips.
As a tireless advocate for responsible recreational fishing access, she contributes mightily to the The Groundfish Cooperative Data Collection Program.
That happens with the help of 40 statewide vessels like hers, whose teams are trained on sampling and measuring whole fish, and ask their clients to pass their catch through some quick measurements before they filet it, sending parts of the fish to California Fish & Wildlife labs for sex, maturity and genetic testing.
It’s an elegantly simple way to apply existing efforts (ongoing sport fishing) to address an existing challenge (lack of data to inform federal ground fish stock assessments).
And a reminder often the best ideas are often the simplest ones.
Sportfishing vessels interested in participating can email westcoast.groundfish@noaa.gov
The Magnusson-Stevens act is required reading.
Margaret Spring speaking about MSA
An important chunk of the council member oath goes like this: “I commit myself to uphold the provisions, standards, and requirements of the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.”
Which means it’s really helpful that you know what the Magnuson–Stevens Act (MSA) is.
Enter MBFT’s own Margaret Spring, who recently resigned her active post to focus more on ridding the oceans of plastics, but remains very connected to our work.
Before she co-created The Trust, or became Monterey Bay Aquarium’s chief conservation and science officer, she sought out a balance between conservation and commerce as a U.S. Senate staffer who helped introduce the Magnuson–Stevens legislation that changed fishing worldwide.
The Magnuson–Stevens Act declared the U.S. would protect waters within 200 miles of its shores, and created the regional councils that oversee the current fishing rules that make the United States the global leader in wise ocean management.
Consider this: Before the MSA you could spot trawlers from Russia and Europe off the New Jersey shore because national law didn’t define domestic water boundaries.
“The Magnuson-Stevens Act is an undisputed global management success story,” Spring said, “with a list of continuing challenges.”