Something fishy is moving from the Woodley Island Marina’s docks across the bay to Eureka’s Madaket Plaza, where Humboldt County will have its first fisher’s market, starting in May or June.
Ashley Vellis, owner of Ashley’s Seafood, has been brewing up the idea of a local fish market since late 2019 and is now partnering with the North Coast Grower’s Association to organize it, currently working on fundraising to make the new addition to Eureka’s waterfront a reality.
Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery says he hopes the market will be similar to other events held in Eureka, like Art’s Alive and Friday Night Markets, which have been successful in bringing more people into the city.
“I think it’s something our community has been missing for a long time,” says Slattery. “We’re very supportive of our commercial fishing industry and I think it’ll be a good thing.”
Taking inspiration from dockside markets in Santa Barbara, San Diego and San Francisco, Vellis says that she wants to make it more accessible for people to purchase seafood directly from the source. The vision is that local fishers will have stalls to sell their latest and freshest catch. Residents will then be able to take their fish to be filleted, or gutted and gilled at a processing station on site, before heading home with fish ready to cook. Currently, the plan is for the market to be open every other Saturday through October, when boats begin preparing for the crabbing season.
There is also the possibility local food trucks will attend the market and serve fresh seafood on the spot, though Vellis says those ideas are still in the works, and the primary focus is just to allow local fishers to sell directly to their customers.
Yoshi Shimura, a member of the local commercial fishing fleet, says fish like rockfish, halibut and potentially salmon will be in season during the months the market is open.
Vellis says she’s hopeful a variety of local fishing boats will participate. “This is for all Humboldt County commercial fishermen, and I’d like to express it’s from Shelter Cove to Orick, so we’re hoping to really build something that everybody can work with and eventually everybody can be a part of.”
Vellis says the goal is not for the market to replace direct sales already under way from the docks in Woodley Island Marina, but to give customers and fishing crews a new option. “We want to really encourage people to still feel comfortable to go visit your fishermen down on the waterfront,” she says, while noting the docks pose a barrier for some customers. “A lot of the feedback that I’ve heard was: ‘It’s really hard to get down there,’ ‘We just don’t know whenever they’re there,’ and ‘Physically, I struggle walking down the walkways and down onto the dock.’ And we wanted to make it more family friendly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen littles kind of run past their parents to go see something at the end of the dock.”
Despite the county being right next to the coast, Humboldt County has never had a fisher’s market. And many feel it’s long time it did.
Native communities in Humboldt County have caught and consumed their own fish — especially salmon, a dietary and cultural staple — for millennia, though the commercial industry didn’t start up until the 1850s, when Eureka became one of California’s most productive commercial fishing ports.
According to a fishing sustainability report prepared by then Humboldt State University, commercial fishing locally was generating about $12 million a year in annual revenue by the mid 1960s, making up about 5.5 percent of Eureka’s economy. By 1970, Humboldt Bay’s 450 commercial fishing boats were hauling in more than 25 million pounds of seafood a year, according to the report.
But in recent decades, the industry has struggled. Costs for everything from fuel to permits have risen steadily, the climate crisis and other factors have impacted fish populations, and regulations aimed at preserving species — including crab and salmon — have tightened.
Only about 100 commercial boats now dock at Woodley Island Marina, according to the Humboldt Bay Harbor District. As of 2020, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, about 12 million pounds of seafood annually was coming off docks in Eureka to head to market.
Shimura, who moved to the county from Southern California in 2018, says he’s been surprised by how hard it is to find fresh fish in Humboldt County. “When I first came up here, I was shocked [at the lack of] availability of fresh fish, especially in a fishing port town,” he says. “In my opinion, I think you should have a fish market on each end of town and the harbor, being able to walk up to the harbor and buy fresh fish off the boats, but there was no fish market open, and barely anybody sold fish off the docks.”
Slattery says the city had official plans to create an off-sale fish market when Madaket Plaza was developed back in 2011, but they did not come to fruition. “If you’ve been in Jack’s Seafood, that front portion of the restaurant when you walk in to the left, that was supposed to be an off sale [market]. That’s what it was designed for,” he says, adding that the market just didn’t make it into final plans. “The cards just didn’t fall the right way and it didn’t happen at that point, so it just never got built.”
Shimura says not many residents know they can purchase fresh fish at the docks. “Selling our product is harder than catching the product,” he says. “It kind of sounds ridiculous but that’s what our battle is. There’s plenty of times where there’s good fishing and you just don’t go cause there’s nowhere to sell the product. I think it’s a shame, because there’s a lot of local people that want product and they just don’t know.”
Shimura says when he can fish, he usually takes his catch down to Petaluma or San Francisco to sell as it gives him a better opportunity to earn a little more money. “What I’m seeing happening [at the markets] in San Diego, Santa Barbara, Oceanside, all these little fishermen are able to completely sell out of their catch in hours instead of having to sit on your boat with a sign up for the whole weekend, maybe a whole week, and risking the quality, the freshness of your fish, and maybe even having to discard some of your catch because it’s not fresh anymore because it’s taking so long,” Shimura says.
Megan Kenney, director of the North Coast Growers Association’s Harvest Hub, says the market will allow fishers cut out processors and middlemen to sell directly to customers in an efficient way. “The dockside market is something that other communities have done and has been very successful to really uplift fishermen and give them the opportunity to increase their sales and also just be more in control of their market opportunities,” she says.
Kenney says it’s difficult for small commercial fishing boats to compete against large-scale operators, which drive down prices, likening the situation to small local small farmers competing against industrial mega producers.
“We have all of these huge fishing and international fishing vessels that can just go and scoop up everything in the ocean,” Kenney says. “They don’t really care about by-catch or making sure that they’re not catching other mammals or things within their nets,whereas our fishing fleet is really small-scale. A lot of them have the ability to sort through and make sure that they’re not killing animals that they aren’t intending to bring back to shore for food. Right now, if fishermen in Humboldt want to be able to sell their fish wholesale, they have to go through these very large processors who are continually increasing the costs that the fishermen have to pay in order to get them to sell their fish for them.”
Patrick Burns, who owns the fishing vessel BELLAJII, says the low prices offered by large processing companies make it difficult for smaller fishers to focus on providing quality over quantity. “It’s very hard for a small guy to make a living off of what the companies are offering to pay,” he says. “Because a lot of times the price is so small that it forces you to have to go out and try to catch in volume so that you can make any profit.”
Despite struggles with pricing and sales, Burns continues to fish.
“The best way I can put it is, if you fall in love with the misery, your heart will never be empty,” Burns says. “That’s the bones of it. It can be a miserable, hard job, but there’s something about it. When you’re out on the ocean, and you see the things that we see, and you experience the things that we experience, and you have a bond with your deck hands and everybody out there, you don’t want to let that go.”
Burns says he’s hoping the market will allow him to keep doing what he loves, while fetching a better price. “I’m hoping that it addresses fishermen getting a fair price for their catch instead of having to sell their catch for pennies on the dollar to a company that’s going to turn it right around and sell it to the general consumer,” he says. “Instead of getting that very low price, we’ll be able to cut out some of the middleman and actually experience getting a fair price for our product.”
Anne To (she/her) is a California Local News Fellow placed with North Coast Journal, Inc. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 312, or anne@northcoastjournal.com. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
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This article appears in There’s a Fish Market Splashing into Eureka.