Fishermen Caught in Sea Change

It’s the middle of the night, and Scotty Hockema’s eyes are wide open. He blinks, sits up in bed, reaches for a small spiral notebook and scribbles:

Open a motorcycle shop.

Where did that come from? he wonders. The mind works in mysterious ways when angst-ridden. On another night, he writes: Operate heavy machinery. The entry becomes part of a free-ranging list: Buy rental properties. Run a whale-watching service. Develop land.

He fills a notebook, then another. Soon dozens of notebooks litter his house, dog-eared and marked up, the scattered thoughts of a 37-year-old man trying to figure out what to do for the rest of his life.

Hockema is a commercial ground fisherman. He’s done nothing else since he was a child. But biologists say groundfish -- species that feed at or near the ocean bottom -- are in rapid decline, and now the federal government, in an attempt to shrink a devastated West Coast ground-fishing fleet, is offering to buy out many fishermen’s permits and boats.

In exchange, Hockema and other fishermen who take part in the buyout program would agree to give up fishing.

A reduction in the fleet, the idea goes, might prolong the livelihoods of fishermen who continue on -- fewer fishermen means less competition -- but for many of those who’ve chosen to opt out, the future looms as a great unknown.

“We’re scared to death,” says Hockema one drizzly morning in the wheelhouse of his boat, the 75-foot Pacific Raider.

The boat, painted jet black with red letters, is moored in the Charleston marina a few miles east of the town of Coos Bay. It rocks gently in the water, side by side with other trawlers, their outriggers splayed like giant antennas.

There are about 260 ground-fishing permit holders who operate roughly the equivalent number of trawlers on the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California. Trawlers drag massive nets along the ocean bottom, scooping up species such as the colorful rockfish, served in restaurants as Pacific red snapper.

The buyout program works like a reverse auction, with the fishermen submitting bids to the National Marine Fisheries Service for how much they want the government to pay for their boats and permits. The agency aims to pay each fisherman the value of his boat plus one year’s earnings based on a three-year average. Bids that come closest to the government’s estimates of value have the best chance.

The agency received 108 bids (including one from Hockema) and accepted 92 of them, but it won’t announce the winning bids until after the buyout plan is approved by a majority of West Coast ground fishermen, including trawlers, crabbers and shrimpers. The fishermen will vote today, and the result will be announced Nov. 12.

Under the plan, $10 million in grant money plus $36 million from a government-backed loan would be used to buy out the trawlers whose bids are accepted. The $36-million loan would then be repaid by those who continue fishing and would theoretically benefit from reduced competition.

The buyout would retire more than a third of the trawler fleet, marking another milestone in the decline of the U.S. fishing industry. Lawmakers from California, Oregon and Washington lobbied for the program, arguing that the federal government bore some responsibility for the fishermen’s plight.

In the 1970s, the government promoted fishing by offering incentives for fishermen to buy bigger and better boats. The result was too many boats chasing too few fish. The government since 1995 has spent $140 million in similar buyouts of other fisheries in Alaska, New England and the Pacific Northwest.

Hockema says his decision to call it quits is as difficult as any he’s ever made. He and his wife went back and forth for weeks, right up until the Aug. 30 deadline, to submit bids. They had to Fed-Ex theirs to get it in on time.

It came down to a few simple facts: Regulators have closed off 75% of the fishing grounds. The price of fish is nearly the same as 25 years ago while the costs of fuel and ice, equipment and maintenance all keep going up. Though supermarket prices for fish continue to increase, most of the profit goes to processors and distributors.

“There’s no money in it, there’s no future in it,” Hockema says, “and everybody’s against us.”

Biologists say canary rockfish may soon be wiped out because of overfishing. Lingcod and ocean perch and bocaccio and five other groundfish species may follow, headed the way of the dodo and the dinosaur if rates of decline continue.

“Make sure to put ‘fisherman’ on the list,” Hockema says. “We’re endangered. We’re going extinct. We’re like the loggers, the farmers. We’re vanishing just like them.”

*

Seawater in His Veins

There’s no self-pity in his voice. Hockema speaks in terse sentences that don’t fluctuate in tone. He says “I’m just sick to death about this” with the same monotone he uses to say: “They’re supposed to be here at 8.” He says he doesn’t want to elicit sympathy.

Hockema is waiting for his crew. They’re supposed to get the Pacific Raider -- just returned from shrimping -- ready to go ground fishing. The crew will replace shrimp-fishing gear with trawl gear. The conversion will take two to three days.

He paces the boat deck, spraying down equipment with a squirt bottle as he passes.

He’s a sturdy, average-sized man with a face that droops on both sides, making for a slight hang-dog expression. He wears the typical fisherman’s garb: T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, baseball cap. He has laborer’s hands, strong and gritty.

As he sees it, he’s got seawater in his veins. His great-grandfather fished these grounds, as did his grandfather and uncle. Hockema started fishing at age 6 as a crew member on his grandfather’s boat.

By the time he was 9, he would start the boat’s engine and warm it up before the rest of the crew arrived in the mornings. He became a skipper at 17 and bought his first fishing boat at 27. Today he owns two boats and holds a handful of permits for groundfish, shrimp and crab for each of the West Coast states.

The fishing life suits him. He likes being out on the ocean, the physical rigor, even the erratic hours. It could be quiet for days and then feverishly busy for days. He likes the hunt and the adrenaline high of a big catch.

Hockema, with a hint of nostalgia, describes how a net full of rockfish, air bladders coming out of their mouths, would rise to the surface like “a big submarine” breaching the water. The crew would often walk out onto the floating net of fish, screaming and celebrating and snapping pictures of one another.

But such big hauls have come less and less frequently.

West Coast ground fishermen have seen catches go from a 20-year average of about 74,000 tons through the mid-1990s to less than half that in recent years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Sales from Oregon’s groundfish fleet dropped to $14 million last year, down from nearly $35 million in 1995. The dwindling figures have trickled down to skippers and crew members, many of whom can no longer earn a living wage.

*

‘Dire Straits’

“Many boats simply can’t sustain the loss of income,” says Steve Bodnar, executive director of the Coos Bay Trawlers Assn. Bodnar says because of these “dire straits,” most trawlers will vote to approve the buyout.

Although no fisherman would disclose the specifics of his bid, Bodnar says the average buyout would be about $460,000.

It sounds like a lot of money, Bodnar says, but once you subtract 25% to 30% for taxes and the amount still owed on the boat, many fishermen will be left with relatively little.

Boats generally cost between $350,000 and $750,000. One local fisherman, John Silva, said in a recent meeting that he owed $200,000 on his trawler. Hockema says only that he’ll not get anywhere near what his boats are worth and that one of his boats, the 84-foot Pacific Storm, is worth closer to $1 million.

Many fishermen will use the money to start another livelihood. This buyout, unlike past programs, doesn’t have a provision to retrain the fishermen in other trades.

They must also figure out what to do with their boats. The government doesn’t want them; it would be too costly to store or scrap them. Under the agreement, the boats can never be used for fishing again -- by the owners or anyone else -- although owners can sell the parts.

Hockema, in a moment of gloom, says he imagines taking his boats out to sea and letting the Navy use them for target practice. Once on the ocean floor, they could act as artificial reefs, with fish swimming in and out of the holes.

Hockema’s crew arrives one by one, loping down the long path to the end of the dock.

Kevin Porter, the skipper, arrives first. He’s 43, been fishing since he was 19. He’s slim and neat with long brown hair flowing from the back of his baseball cap. He summarizes the story of how he got into fishing:

It was 1979, and the minimum wage was $2.90. “I got on a boat and made $500 on my first day,” he says. “It wasn’t a hard sell after that.”

Skippers on high-catch boats earned $80,000 to $120,000 a year during the heyday of ground fishing. Today, skippers might make half that, and crew members are lucky to make $3,000 a month. With shorter seasons, catch limits and regulators closing off fishing grounds, crew members rarely work 12 months a year; three to six months is more typical.

Hockema often leads his crew, usually made up of a skipper and two or three crewmen.

One of the crewman arrives. David Worthan, 44, is tall, gangly and missing his upper front teeth. Last year he made $12,000 on another boat, hardly enough to support his three kids. He’s worked fishing boats for more than two decades and has seen his pay decrease each of the last five years.

The last crewman, Josh Hemion, 25, rushes up onto the boat deck. His car wouldn’t start and he had to hitch a ride, he says. He grins nervously, the fingers of one hand coiled into the folds of a faded T-shirt. He’s fished since 1997. Before that he was a butcher at his father’s grocery store in Colorado.

The men set to work immediately, securing huge pieces of machinery and equipment weighing as much as several tons apiece, and hoisting them onto a flatbed truck using a small crane. They work at a fast pace, running and tying and yelling directions at one another, sometimes slipping on the wet floor of the deck.

None of the crew has health insurance.

Hockema watches pensively. He knows every time out could be the last time he goes fishing. Maybe the last time for his entire crew.

“When they get done with this buyback, there’s going to be 300 or 400 people without jobs, three to four people for every boat,” Hockema says. “What’s going to happen to them? It’s going to be every man for himself.”

*

Uncertain Future

The crew members are asked what they plan to do if Hockema is bought out.

Porter: “My girlfriend asks me the same question, and I tell her the same thing. I don’t have the slightest idea. I really don’t.”

Worthan: “Go back to logging, I guess. All I’ve done is logging and fishing. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Hemion: “I’ll probably go back to being a butcher man.”

Seagulls circle the boat. Sea lions weave through the dark green water of the marina, looking for scraps. Hockema broaches the subject of extinction again. He’s nervous for his wife and two young sons. He talks about his household “holding its breath” for the next thing to happen.

Even worse is leaving a way of life so intertwined with his sense of identity. Scotty Hockema has always been a fisherman’s name in his mind. Who is he now? Perhaps a future land developer or a motorcycle salesman. Maybe a welder or a construction worker. Whatever he ends up doing, he says he plans to avoid the water. It would hurt too much to be out there and not be able to do what he’s always done.

“When I leave the ocean,” he says, “I’m never going back.”