Morro Bay Fishing Fleet Losing a Rock
Just about everyone on the docks knows the Gianninis.
For 46 years, the family has run a marine supply house a couple of blocks from the wharf. When times were good, they would outfit whole fleets from aisles crammed with such items as tiny brass grommets and huge spools that could spin out miles of line and countless acres of net. When times weren’t so good, they would carry debt-ridden fishermen on their books season after season -- until the next big haul, or maybe the one after that.
But that was before competition from cheap imported fish, before diesel fuel that runs upward of $3 a gallon and before environmental rules that severely limit the amount of fish a fisherman can catch, and when and where and how.
Now the fishing fleet at Morro Bay is down from several hundred boats to perhaps 50. And, amid coils of anchor chain and crates of engine parts, Giannini’s is hung with hand-painted signs that say, in big red letters: “ALL SALES FINAL.”
In a month or so, the business will close for good.
On a cold morning in a back room of the store’s nearly vacant second floor, 90-year-old Joe Giannini sat with his daughter-in-law Eileen, who has run Giannini’s Marine Service & Equipment in its waning days. Wearily, Giannini, a trim man with a crown of white hair and a voice that still can boom through the fog, issued an obituary for the way of life that has defined his community for generations.
“When you think about it, it breaks your heart,” he said. “But there’s just no future here.”
In 1973, Giannini sold the store he had established 13 years earlier to his son Jody, who had started working there in high school. But, beset by health problems and depressed over the store’s prospects, Jody, a well-known advocate for the local fishing industry, committed suicide last June. He was 57.
“He knew the business couldn’t be a business much longer,” said Eileen, his widow, her eyes filling with tears. “His biggest regret was shutting down what his dad started.”
Joe Giannini pursed his lips and nodded. He is a former mayor of Morro Bay, a former publisher of the town newspaper, a former commercial fisherman -- and soon he will be a former owner of a defunct business that served a dying industry.
In its day, the store was so successful that it sprawled into an adjacent building. Shelves that now are just about bare were piled high with hip waders and rubber boots, bluejeans and yellow slickers, coils of rope, anchors of every size, bilge pumps, diesel stoves, hydraulic whatnots and steel chains with links as big as a fist.
On windy days, fishermen would gather at the store to trade gossip or jaw about the latest environmental proposal.
“If you had a problem with your boat or a problem in your life, it was the place to go,” said Rick Algert, Morro Bay’s longtime harbor director.
Today Giannini’s has the somber feel of a mom-and-pop store on its last legs. A tattered banner thanks customers for their years of loyalty. Bargain hunters quietly check out the prices on bolt-cutters and halogen lamps, and thumb through navigation charts that guide them to, in some cases, waters that can no longer be fished.
“We had ‘em all,” said Giannini, poring over a rack of maps. “Here’s Anacapa Passage, San Luis Bay -- we had ‘em all.”
Giannini has the ruddy complexion and thick hands of a man who has spent his life outdoors. He lives alone, still drives, and occasionally is called upon to appraise fishing vessels. When he talks about the sea, he grows as animated as some men do when talking football.
“When I got here, the ocean was alive!” he said. “You could pluck razor clams off of Morro Rock, and big Pismo clams would just wash up on the shore -- you didn’t even have to dig! In the tide pools you’d turn over a rock -- and there it all was, just teeming!”
Pismo clams are now so rare that commercial clamming is banned in Pismo Beach, about 25 miles down the coast.
Giannini came to town by accident, in 1946.
Fishing for soupfin shark out of San Francisco, he and his crew on the schooner Arctic came across a disabled fishing boat 100 miles off the coast. They towed the boat, the Joe Jr., to the newly opened harbor at Morro Bay.
In gratitude, the Joe Jr.’s five Italian crew members prepared a shipboard feast of clams and abalone. A couple of girls from the little town of 900 climbed aboard with baskets of chicken and salad. Locals congratulated Giannini on the rescue.
“I thought, ‘My God, what a place!’ ” recalled Giannini. “It was just wonderful.”
After three days, he bought a house for $8,500 and asked his wife in Oregon to join him.
“Where’s Morro Bay?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
Over the years, he became one of the community’s biggest boosters.
He helped get the ragtag collection of vacation homes and fishermen’s shacks incorporated as a city in 1964.
He pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to preserve Morro Rock, the 587-foot harbor landmark that was being chipped away for road fill.
“There’s only one Morro Rock, and it’s part of our heritage,” he said. “They could find rocks somewhere else.”
And when a wave of T-shirt shops and condos threatened to wash over the waterfront, he helped persuade voters in 1984 to pass Measure D, which bans almost everything but fishing from a sizable stretch of it.
Meanwhile, the marine supply business he started after his years of fishing flourished, serving fishermen up and down the California coast.
During one hectic albacore season early on, Giannini went up in a plane and counted the fishing boats crammed into Morro Bay.
“It was unimaginable,” he recalled. “There were 335 of them. When we got to work in the morning, there would be 50 or 60 guys already lined up, waiting for gear. I sold 105 5-inch Sony TVs, and I got a call from the company about it: ‘Just what are you doing up there anyway?’ ”
It’s been years since anyone called to talk about how great business is.
Like many fishermen, Giannini rattles off a list of what he sees as assaults on his livelihood: government protection of the sea otter, with its huge appetite for abalone; concern about overfishing, which led to rules that put ever-expanding patches of coastal waters off-limits; a crackdown on trawlers, whose nets disrupt the sea floor; corporate fishing operations squeezing out the little guy; foreign fishermen selling at rock-bottom prices; and on and on.
“In honesty,” he acknowledged, “the trawlers could be pretty destructive -- but these quotas we’ve got now are draconian. What they’re doing to this area is devastating -- and for no good reason.”
Government agencies and many environmental groups disagree, contending that overfishing has sapped coastal fish populations.
The bottom line: Few fishermen hand the business down to their kids these days. Morro Bay has only one sportfishing outfit left, and its season has been cut dramatically. The town no longer has a fish processor. And Algert, the harbor director, said the operator of the last remaining fuel dock is having a tough time of it.
Then there’s Giannini’s -- one of the last remaining such stores on the Central Coast, and just the latest in a long list of fishing-related casualties.
Standing on a dock after an outdoor board meeting of the Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Organization, Jeremiah O’Brien talked about Jody Giannini’s faith in him when he started out 26 years ago.
“He asked me how much money I had, and I told him I was broke,” recalled O’Brien, a taut man with a weathered face. “Then he asked me how much gear I had, and I said none. That’s when he told me: ‘OK, you’ve got unlimited credit here. Pay us when you can.’ ”
Nobody is giving away money in Morro Bay these days, but some environmental groups, including Environmental Defense and the Nature Conservancy, have offered help. In return for fishermen signing off last year on a huge no-trawl zone about the size of Connecticut, the conservancy is offering to buy trawlers from fishermen who want to get out of the business.
Ultimately, said the conservancy’s Chuck Cook, fishermen will have to develop markets for pricier fish that can be harvested without dragging the seafloor.
“We’re trying to move from high volume and low value to low volume and high value,” Cook said. “We recognize it’s going to take some years.”
For Joe Giannini, that will be years too late. “I sometimes go out to the rock and look over at the harbor,” he said. “There’s nothing there any more. It’s just about gone.”
