Sailing for Salmon

Bristol Bay’s sailing salmon fleet being towed to the grounds.

We am a total sucker for these kinds of pictures. Eerie, evocative, beautifully composed, we love looking at them.  Then we start to think how cold and uncomfortable it must have been, perhaps raining, certainly windy, probably damp or downright wet. Fishing was hard and dangerous work.

But it makes for great pictures and these are from a 68-page publication called Sailing for Salmon: The Early Years of Fishing in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, 1884-1951. It’s written by Tim Troll and  John Branson for Anchorage Museum, as part of an exhibit from its photography archives.

Some of the men in these pictures might have been from Astoria; certainly some were from Seattle.  We’re not sure when this picture was taken, but men fished using sails in Bristol Bay until the 1950s. The federal government, which managed Alaskan fisheries during those years,  had no control over how many men and boats entered the fishery. To ease the pressure on the stocks, they mandated inefficiencies–such as having sailing boats to catch salmon in the Bay.

Sailing for Salmon on Bristol Bay

Fishing in Oregon–thanks to Monterrey, CA., and Seattle, WA.

California sardines

It has been with a great deal of pleasure that we’ve gotten back to our current preoccupation, which is short history of the development of fisheries and fisheries science in Oregon, which we will use in the class we’re teaching fall term in the Honors College at Oregon State.

There really is a we involved, I am working with Mary Hunsicker, who is a fisheries oceanographer at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Center in Santa Barbara. . Bob Hitz is tracing the paths of some of the West Coast’s most prominent fishery research ships and he’ll be posting on that soon. We all have different parts of the same story. By combining our pieces together, we have a much richer and much more illuminating sense of what has been happening on in the ocean off our coast.

The more I thought about the development of fishing off Oregon, the more I realized how

Chinook Salmon

irrelevant the state lines were. Fishing developed in two places along the West Coast, and it developed around two iconic fish, sardines and salmon.

A California sardine both, the Nordby, making a delivery to Coos Bay in 1935. Photo courtesy of of the Coos Historical and Maritime Museum.

The two species could not be more different. The California sardine is a small, oily fish that inhabits coastal waters, where it provides sustenance for larger fishes, marine mammals, and seabirds. Pacific salmon are a top predator that migrates great distances between rivers and the open ocean, bringing vital marine nutrients from the sea to the freshwater and riparian ecosystems. Yet both could be canned, and both were found in such plentiful abundance that investors flocked to the two industries.Too many boats entered both fisheries. Both took a long time to recover from overfishing. And both have played important roles in shaping the development of American fisheries science–and in Japanese and Soviet fishing sciences as well, but that’s a topic for a later.

Fisheries off the West Coast developed on a regional basis, unimpeded by state or national boundaries. American salmon and halibut boats fished off British Columbia and into the waters of Bristol Bay in Alaska, then international waters. American tuna clippers during the 1930s increasingly fished off Mexico, then Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. Fishing boats moved with ease and so did the processing equipment. When fisheries failed in one area, the equipment could be moved to a new site. As Puget Sound salmon stocks faltered after World War One, processing equipment was moved to Alaska.[1] As the California sardine fishery dwindled in the 1950s, the processing equipment was moved to Peru.[2] The development of fishing was the building of a network of fishermen, boats, and scientists.

Monterrey, California, and Seattle, Washington, were geographically separated, but they were the centers for the development of the West Coast’s two most important fisheries. They were not only linked by the fish, but by the fishermen like George Moskovita, who participated in both fisheries. And they are also linked by the science. Just as George  navigated the waters between Bristol Bay and Baja, California, so did scientists like Charles Gilbert, William F. Thompson, and Dayton Lee Alverson. The science followed the fisheries; as fishermen landed increasing numbers of fish, new state and federal fisheries agencies struggled to gain understanding of the fish and impose regulations to control the catch and sustain the stocks.

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One of the characteristics of the development of fishing off Oregon is that it was generally instigated by capital from outside the region, looking to make high returns on investment. California boats and processors played significant roles in the development of Oregon’s trawl and tuna fisheries. Federal money, first as price supports during World War II and the Korean War, helped provide a steady market for the fluctuating supplies of fish. The creation of the National Sea Grant Program after 1966 brought federal dollars into the development of fishery research programs. The initial focus was to make fishing more efficient, with research into gear technology and processing methods for fish that did not have a ready market, such as Pacific hake.

Once we have an overview of how fisheries and fisheries science developed, we’re hoping that more people will come forward to add color and texture to this important project in environmental history and history of science.

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[1] Charles Gilbert and Henry O’Malley, Special Investigations of Salmon Fishery in Central and Western Alaska, Alaska Fisheries and Fur Industries, Document 891, 1919, 143-160.

1919.

[2] Gregory Cushman, The Lords of Guano: Science and Management of Peru’s Marine Environment, 1800-1973, Ph.D dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2003.

 

A Fishy New Book! Alaskan Salmon Traps!

Alaskan Fish Trap,

The salmon traps used along Alaska’s coast beginning in the late 1800s were among the most efficient fish catching devices the world has ever seen. In a four-month fishing season, a single trap, operated by one or two watchmen, could catch hundreds of thousands or even a million salmon.For over seventy years, the traps supplied canneries with cheap, live salmon, and for seventy years they were controversial. In an economic model likened to colonialism, the largest slice of the profit pie went south, to cannery owners in the lower 48. Territorial Alaskans howled, but decades passed before Alaska became a state and the traps were outlawed in public waters.

Alaska Salmon Traps is a richly-illustrated history of Alaska’s salmon trap era, including detailed descriptions of the design, construction, and operation of salmon traps. Author James Mackovjak’s thoroughly researched and documented text incorporates 48 historical photos and 30 diagrams to bring an almost forgotten technology, and the controversy that surrounded its use, back to life.

Alaska Salmon Traps by James Mackovjak was published in May of 2013.

Dayton L. Alverson – My Mentor

Charles R. Hitz                                          May 23, 2013

I attended the memorial service for Dr. Dayton L. Alverson’s life at the John Knox

Dr. Dayton Lee Alverson

Presbyterian church in Normandy Park on Saturday Jan. 26, 2013.  There were two tables set up with all the awards he had received during his career and one of them was a plaque with my drawing of the R/V John N. Cobb.  He was proud of this vessel, since he started his full-time career at the same time that it was launched in 1950.  It was dedicated as the research vessel for the newly formed federal government Exploratory Fishing and Gear Research Base in Seattle, where he was hired.

The R/V John N. Cobb

During World War II the U.S. was short of many war items, including food. I remember the ration cards that gave us a small share of meat and butter when it was available.  A 1942 report on the king crab survey that was done just before war started indicated that there was a resource of king crab and bottom fish in the Bering Sea, so the government started looking at the oceans for food.  By the time the war ended there were plans for exploratory bases throughout the country to determine what resources were out there.

Lee was just getting started in this exciting endeavor after returning from World War II as a veteran who served in China and then graduated from the U/W College of Fisheries in 1949 on the GI bill.  From 1950 to 1953 he had a full-time job with the exploratory base in Seattle and began looking for new resources in the waters of the Northeastern Pacific, but the base’s mission changed in 1954, when the federal government faced a crisis.  U.S commercial fishermen claimed that Japanese high seas salmon fisheries were taking Bristol Bay fish from the west side of the dateline in the central Pacific, and that the treaty drawn up after the war allowed them to do so.  So the mission of the Cobb changed, this time to sample the North Pacific Ocean, along with other chartered vessels, to determine where salmon migrated and how they mixed in the North Pacific after leaving their spawning grounds.

However Lee felt that this was not his calling, so he left the federal government and went to work with the State of Washington trawl fisheries.  This move gave him the opportunity to understand groundfish fisheries and to get to know the fishermen.   While he was with State he developed a voluntary log system for them to record their catches, which is still used today, and this gave him the opportunity to talk to individual fishermen.  He learned that they did not trust government biologists because they were thought to be connected with enforcement.  With this experience he had gained, Lee was a natural choice to head the Federal Exploratory base when it was looking for a new director in 1959 and had gone back to its original mission.

In 1958, when I began my graduate work at the College of Fisheries the school had guest speakers who lectured on various fisheries subjects and one of them was Dayton L. Alverson, who had just returned from an FAO United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization conference on world fishing methods, held in Hamburg, Germany.  He spoke about the distant water trawling fleets of the world and the change that was starting to occur with the introduction of stern trawlers.

While he was in Germany he had the opportunity to go aboard two different types of distance water trawlers.  The first was a newly built side trawler similar to Adler of the Pioneer class built between 1956 and 1958 which was later sighted off the Oregon and Washington coast in 1965 (1).  The design of the side trawler has proven itself over the years to be ideal and so was used by most fishing nations.

The second was a new experimental stern trawler of the Pushkin class which was just beginning to be produced for distance water fleets, which differed completely on how it handled trawl nets and what was done with the catch.  It towed the trawl from the stern and pulled the fish catch up a stern ramp to the upper deck like whalers did with whale carcasses.  Then a hatch was opened the catch was dumped belowdecks, where it was processed in a factory.  The side trawler, on the other hand, towed the net from the side of the vessel and lifted the catch out of the water over the low side.  That catch was sorted on the open deck.

During my graduate work at the College of Fisheries Dr. Delacy, my advisor, arranged for me to meet Lee Alverson in his new office across the Montlake Bridge in the federal government’s Montlake Lab.  He had just been appointed the director of the base, and I was to talk to him regarding his knowledge of rockfish, which was the research I was interested in.

I went to his office on the second floor of the building, was ushered into his office, introduced myself and told him why I was there and that I wanted to know more about the Rockfish Sebastodes.  He told me that the rockfish were a large group in the Pacific and he believed that one species, the Pacific ocean perch, would dominate the commercial catch in the future.     He also talked about their research vessel John N. Cobb finding an unknown seamount off the coast of Washington, a mountain that rose up near the ocean’s surface and was now called the Cobb Seamount.  Longlines had been set across it and came up with a number of large red rockfish or red snapper, Sebastodes ruberrimus.  We discussed other aspects of that group and the timing of their spawning.  I had a notebook in which I was trying to record what he was saying and, as I got up to leave and headed for the door, he came out from behind his desk, reached out and grabbed my notebook and went back to his desk and started reading what I had written.  He said “You misspelled this fish and that fish” and on and on.  I was embarrassed because of my weakness as a speller and that he was pointing it out to me.  Finally I left with a red face and my corrected notebook and felt that if ever there was a job with Exploratory Fishing, I would be the last to be considered.  Later on, I learned from the office secretary that Lee also was a bad speller and that I probably had made his day when he corrected my notebook.  I was surprised when he hired me.

The next 10 years, when I worked for him between 1960 and 1970, were exciting.  One of the concepts he drove home was to interview fishermen whenever we had the chance, to try to learn what they were thinking about exploring for new or unknown resources and to reiterate that we were not involved with enforcement.  One interview I stood on the dock looking down on a trawler, calling down to a man butchering an illegal halibut on the hatch and asking if I could come aboard.  He looked up and said “Who are you and what do you want?”   I said I was a biologist working for Lee Alverson’s exploratory group and I had no enforcement authority.  He said, “Come aboard then” and we had a good talk.

When I was hired in 1960 I described such a visit when I accompanied Lee on one of those interviews (2).  He would stop by a vessel that he spotted along the waterfront, often occurring on his way to or from work when he drove along the Seattle waterfront.  The information that he got in those interviews helped in planning the exploratory trips of the Cobb.

Lee Alverson’s autobiography, “Race to The Sea” (3) gives insight into his extraordinary life.  I was anxious to get his book when it was first published so I called him and ask if we could come out to his house and pick it up.  He said yes and we went out to Normandy Park and saw him and his wife, Ruby, in their home after so many years.  We admired his wall hung with all the awards that he had received and he pointed out the plaque of the John N Cobb.  We talked about the old exploratory group.  When we left he autographed the book:  “To Bob Hitz, one of the great exploratory scientists who served back when it was “fun”.  Best wishes in the new century.”  It was certainly an amazing time.

I hope my posting on Carmel Finley’s blog will capture the excitement that I felt, and will help establish the history of the Exploratory Fishing and Gear Research group that of which I was a part for 10 years.

(1) See posting of January 10, 2013 “The Russians are Coming Here – 1966”

(2) See posting of October 31, 2012 “The perch spot and the fisherman’s black book”

(3) Alverson, Dr. Dayton L. PHD, Race to The Sea, The Autobiography of a Marine Biologist, 2008, iUniverse, Inc. New York Bloomington 553 pages

“A Crime Against the World,” by Vladil Lysenko

Polar Star, by Martin Cruz Smith

The blog has been busy, busy, busy!  We’re just back from the American Society of Environmental History meeting in Toronto (more on that later, but so nice to see so many historians engaging with fishy topics). But the big news is that I’m going to be teaching a class on Oregon fisheries history fall quarter at Oregon State University. It’s going to be a two-credit class in the Honors College and I’ve been pulling together resources and writing an overview of the development of fishing off Oregon.

I always thought it if got to teach a fisheries history class, I’d start with a novel, by Martin Cruz Smith, Polar Star. Published in 1989, the mystery novel is the third of a series starring a disillusioned Moscow detective, Arkady Renko.  The first book in the series, Gorky Park, was turned into a movie starring William Hurt. It’s a complicated, sprawling tale and it ends with Renko on the run, pursued by the KGB. He winds up in Siberia, cleaning fish on the “slime line” of a factory processing ship, the Polar Star.

Soviet fish processing ships

When the ship’s huge net trawls up the body of a women who worked in the ship’s kitchen, Renko is called in to investigate. Smith writes a fast-paced story, with Renko moving back and forth between the factory processing ship, the American catcher boats, and a day visit to Dutch Harbor, where another killing takes place.

Polar Star is set in the North Pacific, but these giant factory processing ships operated off Oregon during the 1960s, decimating stocks of Pacific Ocean Perch, as Bob Hitz has blogged about.

I want to use the novel to reach out and grab students. It powerfully evokes a world that most of us can only imagine, working on a ship in the Bering Sea. There is a great deal of political intrigue (it is, after all, set in the Cold War and the Polar Star is engaged in tracking American submarines.)

But I’ve just discovered a book that Martin Cruz Smith might have used for some of his basic information about the Polar Star. It’s called “A Crime Against the World,” by Vladil Lysenko, a soviet fishing captain who defected to Sweden. The book was originally published in Swedish, in 1980, and translated into English by Michael Glenny in 1983.

Lysenko’s crime against the world is Soviet fishing practices, which he describes as wasteful, short-sighted, irresponsible—in short, crimes against humanity. Lysenko tells a story of systematic waste, fishing on immature stocks, and the destruction of fish in the Barents Sea.  The indifference about the fish is matched by indifference for the safety of the crew, with dangerous working conditions and an appalling lack of maintenance for vessels and their equipment.

It will be good to have Lysenko’s book at a counterpoint to the novel by Martin Cruz Smith. A major theme in Smith’s book about the Soviet Union is how dysfunctional the system really was and the alienation of his characters, such as Renko. Polar Star doesn’t have too much to say about the fish that the Soviet fleet are catching. But Smith’s powerful indictment of the Soviet system makes Lysenko’s memoir all the more believable.

Oregon’s first fishery collapse

Captain George Moskovita fishing for shark livers

We’re excited to see a new exhibit at the Columbia River Maritime Museum, on sharks. The Museum has a splashy new theater and will be showing Sharks 3D, presented by Jean-Michel Cousteau. But there will be another star, on a smaller screen, and that will be a short video on shark fishing filmed and narrated by Astoria trawler George Moskovita. It will be available on a video monitor, thanks to the generosity of the Moskovita family, which has turned over George’s voluminous collection of photographs and video to the Museum.

With the start of World War II, cod liver oil was no longer available from Norway. That created an opportunities for West Coast fishermen like George. Cod liver oil contained Vitamin A, which had not yet been synthesized.

Oregon’s shark fishery

Scientists found Vitamin A was in the livers of various fish, Most of the oil came from the livers of dogfish shark (Squalus suckleyi) and soupfin shark (Galeorhinus zyopterus). There were fisheries at Astoria, Depoe Bay, Newport, Coos Bay, and Port Orford. The floater fishery took place as much as 100 miles offshore. Fishing began in April off Point Conception and moved northward to the Hecate Straits in British Columbia by September or October.[1]

For fishermen like George, the shark fishery was an unexpected windfall, with shark livers fetching unprecedented amounts of money. George writes in his memoir about selling a batch of shark livers for $14.40 a pound:

“I almost fell off my chair. I couldn’t believe it. I said I would be right down. I couldn’t get there fast enough.”[2]

The high prices sent fishermen after sharks and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a warning in 1944 that sharks were rapidly being depleted. Landings in February of 1944 were 70 percent below those of February 1943, despite more fishermen entering the fishery. Landings at Seattle were down sharply, from 280,000 pounds in February of 1943 to 83,960 pounds in 1944.[3]

There was a sharp drop in demand when the war ended and a corresponding increase in the costs of gear and labor. The dogfish shark fishery ended in 1949 with the collapse of the liver market due to foreign competition and synthetic Vitamin A.[4] Oregon landings peaked in 1943, with 270,000 pounds landed. The next year, landings sank to 50,000. The market disappeared, once scientists learned to synthesize vitamins.[5] 

 Soupfin sharks mature slowly and give birth to a relatively few young at a time, making them vulnerable to overfishing. Their global population has been reduced significantly over the past 60 to 75 years.

We’re excited about this exhibit, and about the Moskovita materials, and grateful to the family for their generosity in turning over the materials, and to the Museum for their willingness to preserve these valuable records of Oregon’s fishing history.

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[1] Fishery Statistics of Oregon, Oregon Fish Commission, Contribution No. 16, September, 1951, 10.

[2] George Moskovita, Living Off the Pacific Ocean Floor: Memoir and Stories by Captain George Moskovita, 2000, p. 37,

[3]
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:_6MdlzicOggJ:www.fws.gov/news/historic/1944/19440410.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESh1te8UnXicyFSNLUK3RRVYjOxNDcyx2OMVWuaqBurx0CN5TcMEhJKfgVMvHUMp_h4ixzvvJGSeKKD1HZ1ivbfY6UL0duB_etC8a-vrTzYgfmjfOFDJ_sD225di-jlJspZO8NgL&sig=AHIEtbTjq18-4N1ThtIIrguAVxVjD1pISQ

[4] Fishery Statistics of Oregon, Oregon Fish Commission, Contribution No. 16, September, 1951,11.

[5] Sigurd J. Westrheim, “The Soupfin Shark Fishery of Oregon,” Research Briefs, Oregon Fish Commission, 3 (1), September, 1950.

Oregon’s pink shrimp fishery, 1951

Pandalus jordani

California played a pivotal role in the development of Oregon’s marine fisheries. Oregon’s pilchard fishery and the albacore tuna fishery were both influenced by California fishermen and their boats. And so was the development of the pink shrimp fishery.

I’ve been reading the Oregon Fish Commission’s Research Briefs. The December, 1952 issue has a paper by Alonzo T. Pruter and George Yost Harry, Jr. They report that fishing for pink shrimp began as early as 1869 in San Francisco Bay, and that shrimp were harvested commercially in Alaska, British Columbia, and Puget Sound. But Washington and Oregon did not develop shrimp fisheries, although there were reports of catches by research vessels and by some otter-trawl fishermen. [1] But were shrimp available in commercial quantities between Point Conception and the Columbia River?

During the fall of 1950 and the spring and summer of 1951, the California Department of Fish and Game conducted explorations off California. The results were positive and boats started delivering pink shrimp. The California department lent its trawl gear to the Oregon Fish Commission, and during the fall of 1951, research began. There were two objectives: to see if shrimp were available—but also to “obtain information concerning the virgin shrimp populations as they exist before being subjected to a possible commercial fishery.”

During the months of October, 1951, and March, April, and May, 1952, 80 exploratory shrimp drags were made between the Columbia and the Rogue River. “Pink shrimp were taken in sizeable quantities in most of the areas explored.”[2]

What strikes me about this account is the collaboration among the scientists, as well as a fisherman, Hugo Lillienthal, who volunteered his vessel, the Nel Ron Die, for the last two cruises off Coos Bay.  It took more research before fishermen started a pink shrimp fishery off Oregon, but it is one of the healthiest sectors of the commercial fishing economy.

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[1] Alonzo T. Pruter and George Yost Harry, Jr., “Results of Preliminary Shrimp Explorations off the Oregon Coast,” Oregon Fish Commission,  Research Briefs, 4 (1), December, 1952,  12-24.

[2] P. 24.

A link to my paper in ICES

President Harry Truman goes fishing, photo courtesy of Truman Presidential Library and Life magazine

I’ve had a scholarly paper published, in ICES, the international fisheries journal. I wrote it with my major professor, Naomi Oreskes, and it’s nice to see it in print at last. What does my paper have to do with President Truman, shown here fishing in Puget Sound in June of 1945? Check here to find out:

Abstract:

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fss192?

ijkey=3X3B5Z0iRTDWJbG&keytype=ref

Full Text:

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/fss192?

ijkey=3X3B5Z0iRTDWJbG&keytype=ref

PDF:

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/fss192?

ijkey=3X3B5Z0iRTDWJbG&keytype=ref

Albacore tuna, the new Oregon fishery in 1937

Albacore tuna, image from the World Wildlife Organization

It’s not often we get such a precise date for the start of a fishery. The Oregon albacore (Germo alalunga) fishery began on Aug. 11, 1936, when the California pilchard boat Robin caught a ton of fish off Coos Bay.[1] The fish were shipped to California for processing, but the next year, Oregon processors, including the powerful Columbia River Packers Association (CRPA), began processing lines to pack tuna. An important new fishery had come to Oregon, stimulated by the expansion of the California sardine fishery.

The 1930s were an enormously volatile time for Oregon fishermen. Monterrey pilchard boats arrived in Coos Bay in 1935, but the catches were erratic; many of the boats left in 1936. Would it be the same thing with the new albacore fishery? It was a question that fishermen were asking, but so were members of the Oregon Fish Commission.

The Commission was struggling to put its management on a more scientific foundation. It established a research division 1938 and appointed Dr. Willis H. Rich as temporary Director of Research, a position that would become permanent when funds were available.[2] The following year, the Fish Commission began publishing research, primarily work done by Rich when he was director of the Department of Biology at Stanford. It was not until 1939 that the Fish Commission began to publish research in “Contributions.” The focus was mainly on salmon, although Contribution No. 10, by Vernon E. Brock, in 1944, looked at the biology of albacore tuna.

The albacore catch went from less than a million pounds in 1936 to 14.5 million by 1940.[3]  Boats were being built and processing capacity expanding, but was it all going to be last?

After all, less than three decades ago, albacore had appeared off California, a fishery had developed; then, the fish had disappeared, for reasons that had not been determined.[4]

Brock’s paper included contact with Dr. Seiji Konda of the Higher School of Fisheries, Hakodate, Japan, who sent a number of issues of the Bulletin of the Japanese Society of Scientific Fisheries. He also sent a series of scales for analysis. The Japanese data included results from the research vessel Fuki Maru, operated by the Shizuoka Prefecture Marine Products Testing Station between January and May of 1937, about 500 miles west of Midway Island.[5]

Brock had begun sampling albacore at sea in 1937, measuring the length of the fish, the sex, and trying to determine the age; one conclusion was that the fish caught off Oregon were two years old.[6]

Brock was also in touch with another scientist who interests me greatly, Dr. Frances Clark, who headed the California Fish and Game Department’s fishery lab at Terminal Island. Clark provided Brock with data from sampling she had off Hawaii in 1929.

Just as fishermen were networking and expanding in the 1930s, so were scientists, collaborating on sharing data, setting up sampling, and participating in tagging studies.

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[1] Vernon E. Brock, “Contribution to the biology of the Albacore (Germo Alalunga) of the Oregon Coast and other parts of the North Pacific,” Department of Research, Fish Commission of the State of Oregon, Contribution No. 10, 199-248.

[2] John C. Veatch, chairman, Fish Commission of Oregon, Contribution No. 1, Department of Research, Fish Commission of Oregon, forward, 1939.

[3] Brock, 199.

[4] Brock, 200.

[5] Brock, 225.

[6] Brock, 239.

An invitation to colloborate on writing the history of fishing and fisheries science

Captain George Moskovita

With the start of the new year, it’s an appropriate time to make a resolution and mine is to invite more voices to participate in helping to write about the history of the development of fisheries and fisheries science in the Pacific Northwest.

I’m really pleased that Charles R. (Bob) Hitz  is writing about his career as a federal government biologist and his encounters with the Soviet fleet off the Northwest coast in the 1960s. The Soviets were catching Sebastes alutus, which has a lot of names on this blog, including Pacific Ocean Perch, POP, rosefish, rosies, and, just to make it more confusing, redfish).  The important thing to know is that they were overfished in the 1960s and the stocks have not rebuilt.

I started this blog five years ago with the intent that it would help me understand the development of fishing on the West coast.  I’m writing a book about these events, but I’m also starting to construct some curriculum for a class a class I’m hoping to teach next year, on the development of fishing off Oregon, and the development of fisheries science at Oregon State University.

Fishing and fisheries science developed in tandem. As Oregon fishermen pioneered new fisheries during the 1930s, for pilchards and albacore tuna, the Oregon Fish Commission responded by creating a research division and assigning scientists to investigate.  I’ve written about the start of the pilchard fishery here. And an Oregon pilchard is basically a California sardine, in case you were wondering.

There are many voices threaded through the blog posts over the years; the scientists I’ve talked with, such Jergen Westrheim. And then there are the memoirs, by scientist Lee Alverson, but also by Astoria trawler George Moskovita, Living off the Pacific Ocean Floor.

Over the next year, I’ll be putting a curriculum together; when I do, I’ll publish it and invite suggestions for improving it. But in the meantime, if you’re interested in contributing to this public history project, Bob and I would welcome your contribution.