March 2023 - The Director's Corner
Welcoming FV Noah’s Ark to the Monterey Bay
It was a sunny, cool January day in Moss Landing when I arrived in the early morning hours to witness a sight that hasn’t been seen here much in the past few years. An event that for decades used to happen on a daily, if not weekly basis. A long-time West Coast groundfish trawler, the FV Noah’s Ark, was delivering its first load of groundfish to the dock at Moss Landing. Over 30,000 pounds of flatfish and rockfish were being offloaded for processing. The normally quiet dock area was humming with activity, with a hoist unloading a large tote onto a conveyor belt and workers sorting fish, their bright slickers wet with fish scales and slime.
The owner of Noah’s Ark, David Pettinger, has been a commercial fisherman all his life. He and his brother, Brad Pettinger, run two trawlers between southern Oregon and northern California. Through the 10+yr transformation of the West Coast Groundfish fishery, he managed to stay afloat by making smart investments, embracing new technology like electronic monitoring (EM) and gear innovations like larger mesh panels to reduce incidental discards of smaller fish. But he can’t control the market, which runs on basic supply and demand economics. For most groundfish species, the price hasn’t increased in years, and locally caught rockfish filets have to compete with cheaper imported whitefish filets, hence the coast’s few processors will only take so much. ‘Markets have gotten so tight up here’, said Pettinger,’that I had to look to other geographies for options’.
Brad and David found a new market with Lusamerica, a family owned seafood buyer, processor and distributor based in Morgan Hill. They tested the waters by unloading his boat up in Fort Bragg and trucking fish down. A relationship formed, and they began talking about a more efficient way to get fish to their processing plant.
A new idea for Pettinger and his crew would be to fish a bit further south, and deliver the fish to Lusamerica’s dock in Moss Landing. It would be a longer trip home for the crew, but fortunately the skipper, Curt Meng, knows these waters because every summer they participate in the West Coast Bottom Trawl Survey coordinated by NOAA Fisheries. They could also lease additional quota from the MBFT to cover central coast groundfish species, and they had a good market willing to offload as much fish as they were allowed to catch. It was a good deal all around.
This new partnership is why I found myself on the docks at Moss Landing that early morning in January, watching the workers process all that fish, everyone smiling that they had work to do here. Since then, several more trips have seen over 300,000 pounds of rockfish and sole come in. There’s so much more to this story! Stay tuned for a longer article on this vessel, its crew, and what it means for our economy to have Noah's Ark become part of the Monterey Bay fishing community.