Well. In this case, not that Fitz. Not the one pictured above, anyway. Not exactly.
Usually, while employing a statement similar to the one in the title, like, “Hey Fitz, have you seen the crab claws?”, I am actually referring to Fitz Mangili, our Executive Sous Chef, who has been working with me for the last 5 years. Fitz manages inventory and ordering, and would almost certainly know where a specific parcel of crab in the freezer may be found, as well as general supplies in respect to most things in the kitchen at Aphotic.
Things I know about Fitz: She comes from Philippines, hailing from a mountain town some 2-3 hours north of Manilla called Baguio, (a city I will likely never visit), has a sweet tooth and cannot start her day without methodically consuming some authentic Filipino dainty acquired most often from the Hayward or Daily City location of the Filipino goods market, Seafood City (a store I a may never visit), and has a fetish for sneakers, which witnessed its pinnacle this year when I saw her roll in with a pair of Air Jordans (a shoe I will never wear), and found myself uncontrollably contemplating the cultural crossroads that precipitate a 5 foot, 1 inch Filipina who has never played the game of basketball, to fashionably sport the iconic shoes of the legendary superstar who could fly (a man I will never meet).
Fitz is special, and one of the backbones of Aphotic, but this Blog post is mostly about another storied Fitz - local titan of the sea, and the one pictured below - and someone for whom I have developed another special place in the depths of my frosty heart where few thought a warm place may be found. I am, of course, talking about Steve Fitz, captain of the F/V Mr. Morgan, in Half Moon Bay.
It all began, as it usually does (for me, anyway), with a conversation, struck up in distracted haste on the fish-gut and bird-poop spattered planks of a weather worn commercial port; on this occasion it was the port in Half Moon Bay, known better as the port of Princeton for its collegic ties of sisterhood to the famed Ivy league institution.
I remember catching him as he was refueling his boat at the harbor’s exclusive set price filling pump (talk about a monopolistic entreprise), and I got right in to my quest for things like Skate fish (a common and abundant local fish) and other miscellaneous ocean curiosities he might be bringing up in his purse net that were not hitting the market. I was also looking for a regular supplier of groundfish.
Steve is a sharp fisherman, a shrewd businessman, and a pragmatic New Englander, bearing that seasoned perspective of a man who has witnessed many comings and goings in the world, and not having time or headspace at this point in his career for the wanton flights of starry-eyed dreamers like myself. But the notion of finding another market for his skate (a trash fish, considered by many - but also one of my favorites because of my affinity for trash), I guess was too alluring to pass by the wayside. In all reality, the Pacific Longnose Skate is an incredible fish, both anatomically, and culinarily speaking, and both Steve and I agree on that. The fueling of his boat continued under the supervision of his deck hands, as Steve entertained my babblecock, and eventually agreed to save some product for me on his next trip out.
Steve’s reputation as a fisherman is unparalleled in California, and his fish are a Bay Area staple, serving many restaurants. He inherited the Mr. Morgan, a Louisiana-styled Gulf shrimping boat, from his uncle, the original “salty dog” Fitz (Ah. There’s the connection to the Fitz curiosity that spawned the title), who is also, incredibly, double entendre squared, named Steve, and who pioneered the usage of the Scottish Seine in California - which is a type of low impact purse net fishing that avoids contact with the bottom of the ocean. The Scottish Seine is the most ethical fishing method for larger commercial fishing vessels employing nets for harvest, having zero contact (known as drag) on the ocean floor. As Steve Fitz (of modern times) is the only one in the state of California employing this method of fishery, it makes him something of an anomaly in the trade, and certainly on the West Coast.
Things I know about Fitz: He hails from the Massachusetts town of Salem (famous for the earliest of settlements of Europeans to the Eastern seaboard of this country - a hard liner sect of the Protestant faith known as the Puritans, the infamous Witch Trials of the 1690s, the symbolic headquarters for the 2024 Donald J. Trump Presidential campaign, the slang term “wicked” (perhaps associated with both of the formers), wood shingle siding, apple cider, gingerbread pumpkin spice, and strict elementary education). Fitz is extremely hard working, owing that severe work ethic to his New England heritage and education (bloody ruler type of institutionalists), and probably some of that self-loathing inspired guilt made famous by those aforementioned Puritans. Steve likes baseball, fixing things himself, combustion engine machines, flannel shirts, fish and chips, flavorless American beer, and proper double weighted cocktails. In short, he is a guy from the Boston area.
Given the commonplace hereditary nature of the fishing industry, Fitz’s arrival into the trade was surprisingly not a given, but something of a natural progression. His father, Charles or “Skip” - short for skipper, was boat obsessed, as Steve put it, as those along the historic coasts of the North East tend to be. What might be more rightly noted, is that the family had a firm connection to the ocean, which would manifest itself in different ways throughout their lifetimes.
Steve Fitz, Steve’s uncle (the “salty dog” Steve), who I will call Uncle Steve,(and the current Steve I will refer to as Fitz, and sous chef Fitz Mangili we will just refer to as Chef Fitz, so we can keep things as straight as possible) was the first to really strike out a career in fishing. This was in the 1970s, where commercial fishing in the Boston environs was at the far end of its halcyon days, but the fishing was still manageable, and by that I mean profitable, so long as one has the constitution for sleeplessness, physical atrophy, and prolonged solitude. I guess that what was true then, is still true now. And it’s a hard truth to fathom, even now; there is an unexplainable visceral attraction to the extreme lifestyle that commercial fishing has to offer for those with salt water in their blood, which is distinctly different from a much more commonly known high sodium intake diet that leads to obesity.
Uncle Steve was a senior at Boston University, who worked the boats in Chattem (a famous fishing port town outside of Boston) during the summer breaks. That unexplainable passion for fishing set in, and Uncle Steve dropped out of college to take in the trade full time. The Atlantic cod fishery was dwindling, and perhaps sensing its imminent collapse a decade before its demise, Steve moved along to Alaska in 1980 to work on a “tub trawler”, a form of baited line fishing, where the catch was giant Alaskan Halibut. These were the relatively unregulated days of the 1980s in Alaska commercial fishing, where boat hands worked 3-4 days straight (that is not a joke) under tough weather conditions, constantly baiting hooks and pulling in line, and sorting fish. Drug usage during that era was rampant on the boats (perhaps necessary to stay awake), whereas the relief days at the dock may be met with heavy drinking and licentiousness (also, arguably necessary). Oh, the sailor’s life for me!
1981. After the Alaskan ventures panned out, Uncle Steve made his way down to California to join his girlfriend at the time, settling in to Half Moon Bay. Uncle Steve worked on a couple of trawlers there, while he researched a little known technique of low impact net fishing pioneered by some forward thinking Scotsmen that he learned about from the international cohort of crabby seamen during his time in the Northern parts. In 1983, he purchased a Louisiana shrimp trawler, called the Mr. Morgan, from a disaffected ex-military shrimp boat captain named Dan, drove North through the Panama canal, narrowly escaping the onslaught of high sea pirates, safely delivering his new sea queen to the port of HMB, and thus enshrining this boat to the fate and future of the California Pacific fleet. (All of this is true, except for the part of Lt. Dan, though the Mr. Morgan looks remarkably similar to Bubba and Forest’s rig of Gump fame).
This brings us up to 1986, (the year an international ban on commercial whaling took full force), where Fitz (the current Steve Fitz - please remember the codex) was pursuing studies in business as a freshman at Denver University, actively ski-bumming his Winters in Colorado, pursuing God’s work with the Mountain descendants of another religious following associated with Jesus, and working his uncle’s boat in California during the Summers. The life pattern conveniently, or naturally, replays itself.
Under his Uncle’s influence and stewardship, Fitz eventually became the captain of the Mr. Morgan, continuing his uncle’s program of purse net fishing for groundfish, complemented by pot fishing for Dungeness Crab in the Winter Season - which is marginally safer than the Dorey boat fleets of old, and much more efficient, but depending, in the end, on the which historic Doreyman we are talking about.
Segway into the topic of Crab, which is the focus of this blog entry even if it has not felt that way until now. The complicated political and historical chowder that has embroiled this popular West coast crustacean requires some explanation, which I will endeavor to do now, though redacted for the less historically inclined audience as needs be.
For those who are unaware, the Dungeness Crab season in California used to be rather predictable, even easygoing, and carefree. The crabs come to abundant maturity in October. This is the signal for the fisherman to harvest them. From this natural happening, traditionally, the season opener was just before Thanksgiving, providing the Bay Area with a delicious alternative and relief to the conventional Thanksgiving fare of dry Turkey breast, anti-oxidative supporting cranberry chutney, and a collection of sad casseroles.
The seasonal arrival of mature crabs in Bay Area waters has not changed. Late October is when I usually start to notice big Dungies tumble along the beaches on the western side of San Francisco, and recreational crab fishing usually gets the fog horn season opener approval by early November. But the commercial fleets are held at bay for much longer. In recent history, the opener for commercial crabbing has run as late as mid-December, sometimes not until January, amounting to a tremendous loss in market share revenue for the California crab fishermen.
Since the 1980s, various ocean interest groups, running the gambit from pragmatic ocean and marine life protectionists, to hard line chain yourself to the Seaworld entry gate protesting environmentalists, have been seeking to have a say in the regulation of the California coast, writ large. Equipped with legal expertise, and superfunding from wealthy activists sympathetic to the cause, the primary target of these organizations became the state of California itself, in the form of the Department of Fish and Game, the regulatory body that issues permits for fishing and hunting wild-life.
From my understanding, what was once a rather mundane and passive institution, Fish and Game (now known as Fish and Wildlife), was pushed into a more extreme mode of protectionism due to some rather heavy lawsuits that were raised against them by environmental protectionist groups. Don’t get me wrong. I support the protection of wildlife resources and our ocean’s health, but I also believe that the restrictions have become so overbearing on our local fishermen that we are at the verge of losing an irreplaceable generation of expertise in wild harvest. Let me expand, as there is a middle ground to stand on in this divide.
The first significant efforts in modern times to control the fishing efforts along our shores was in 1976, with the passage of the Magnuson-Steven Fishery Conservation and Management Act. This piece of Federal legislature established geographically defined zones along both coasts of the country, and was a measure largely driven to keep overindulgent international fleets of fishing boats from over-fishing our fish stocks. Historic damage to the cod stocks in the Atlantic, contributing to the eventual collapse of the fishery in the 1990s, was seen as a precursor to what may happen on the West Coast, and so these zones were defined and brought under supervision, kickstarting the ever-intensifying geopolitical conversation around fishing and the environment.
1986. The year that commercial whaling was abolished internationally. Green Peace, with the television ready camera on hand, stoking the public sentiment for our ocean-going mammalian counterparts being brutally hunted in unregulated international waters, contributed to what became an empathic adoption by 88 participating countries known as the International Commission, to hold accountable any unauthorized or accidental killing of a whale, any where, or any time. Ocean stocks of whales were at a critically low level, driving many species to near extinction. We all know the story, and this continues on to this day. The precedent set, however, or an absolutist view on the matter (barring some native tribes, the Japanese, and Iceland), has been wielded in other contexts on the coast of California as a tool to make fishing a continuously tenuous endeavor for all of those involved.
With the collapse of the Atlantic cod stocks in the 90s, as previously cited, increased Federal response to ocean management through its arm, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association), has since severely regulated commercial fishing vessels operating in US waters. Fishermen have been required to have Federal observers on their boats to regulate the fishing harvests, the diversity of those harvests, and the methods in which those harvests were being extracted. And the cost of this monitoring, is born by the commercial fishermen themselves, not the taxpayer, increasing the hardship of an already physically and financially difficult enterprise. Fishing is not as marginally lucrative as, say, venture capitalism or E-commerce, and most commercial fishing outfits in the US are fairly hand to mouth.
And on the international side of things, most Western economies subsidize their fishing industries, a lot like the US does for our large scale agricultural industry, so that the consumer can be delivered a reasonably priced commodity. This is not the case for the American commercial fishing fleets, who are a diverse cohort of independents, and entirely lack the political weight of an effective lobby in DC to fight for their interests. Between 1994-2006, subsidies and economic support to commercial fishing in the US amounted to less than 7 billion, whereas the Department of Agriculture seeded 50 billion to large American farms in 2020 alone.
The 2000s. California Fish and Game (before they became “wildlife”), was from most of its history, a sort of laissez-faire quasi regulatory body that mostly handled the issuance of hunting and recreational fishing permits, with some light regulation on lakes and waterways, etc. There were increasing annoyances to deal with in the early 2000s, like the sudden appearance of domoic acid in West coast shellfish, and subsequent micro closures due to passing health risks to the population.
Then, in 2017, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an environmental protectionist NGO, identified a soft spot in the regulatory system. With the humpback whales on the rise, a couple of whales per year would get entangled in the lines of fishermen and crabbers, sparking outcry from the general whale activist community. The CBD filed a lawsuit against Fish and Game for its tolerance of these incidentals as a part of the greater commercial activity of Dungeness Crab harvest, and Fish and Game found itself poorly equipped to fight against the claims against the Federal Endangered Species Act. The settlement was a black eye for the state of California, amounting to millions of dollars in remedial action, and increased to severe restrictions of the Dungeness crab fishery and fleets, putting them at the mercy of an appointed committee within Fish and Wildlife that decides the season opener depending on whale passage, and can shut it down at any time for whatever reason.
That's a crusher, considering that many more whales are mowed down each year by cargo boats in the high seas, as these mega vessels speed along at 20 knots, which is too fast to turn out of the way of a passing school of whales. In most cases, these collisions with whales are unreported, as it's the high seas, and many boats don't even realize they have struck a whale. The range is between 10-20 thousand (click link) whale collisions a year. Read 10-20 thousand dead whales, and all in the name of that new BMW you are driving, or television screen in your living room, or that plastic Elsa doll that you gave your daughter for Christmas. For the Center of Biological Diversities of the world, it is easier to secure concessions from a sort state regulatory body, as opposed to the giant commercial shipping companies like Maersk, Evergreen, and Cosco.
Usually, when I reach out to Fitz in November to talk crab season opener, it's a sore subject. Even for a top fisherman like Steve, who is diversified in both ground fishing and crab fishing, the increasingly precarious and hostile environment surrounding the commercial enterprise of crab harvest on the West coast has become an issue of intense pain. In recent conversation, after decades of dealing with the regulations, Steve confided in me that he has thought of hanging it all up. Steve is just one actor out there, and he is in a better position than many other fisherman who have already decided that California is too challenging to operate in. Even now, as I pen this entry, the Dungeness crab season is open in Oregon, where the state restrictions are more relaxed (read pragmatic), while California is closed until the Fish and Wildlife commission decide the opener date.
This kind of fragmented policy approach is destroying the California fishing fleets, all while from the consumer side nothing is done to abate the capacity to import fish domestically just across state lines, or internationally, by plane or by cargo boat. The consumer does not often care where the product comes from, but just wants or needs it in a timely basis. And so, literally flying in the face of crippling California restrictions, people are still allowed to fly in tuna from Japan, swordfish from South America, and California market squid processed in Asia, to the detriment of our local industries.
Here's the point I want to make. Darkly, I can see that in the future, local fish could be impossible for the consumer to come by, as the commercial expertise in fishing has been forced out by overbearing restriction. A local commodity, like Dungeness Crab, will be something that is fished by outsourced parties (even international ones), frozen and sent across the ocean to be processed in cheaper labor markets (already the case with squid), and then shipped back on cargo boats that kill way more whales than the commercial fisheries here in California ever did, or could. So, when I reach out to Steve in the future to ask, "Fitz! Where is the crab?", he will likely say, "I don't know. Check the frozen section of Seafood City in Hayward."
As the reader contemplates this dark reality that I did not dream (click link) up, it is my hope that we can all act as better consumers to support the Fitz's in our own communities, so that this prospective vision does not become our collective future nightmare.