As the weekend dawns and California slumbers, the sportfishers descend, like clockwork, on the banks and waves of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
They carry nets for herring or poles for sturgeon, heavy and light tackle, bloodworms or anchovy or any number of delectable morsels to attract the desired target. They tread industrialized East Bay shorelines and marshy Delta banks, hop aboard sporty six-pack boats for more ambitious trips or humbler craft for a leisurely solo excursion. They catch (and often release) a smorgasbord of species: halibut, kingfish (white croaker), or sturgeon around the Bay, or striped bass, salmon, and black bass in the many tendrils of the Delta.
“Here, you get both worlds, fresh and salt,” explains Hamilton Lai, a lifelong fishing enthusiast who has trolled the Bay and Delta for nearly 40 years.
Like many people who fish for pleasure, Lai recalls a time when fish were so abundant in the Bay that he’d catch his daily limit within 15 minutes. Today, “you’re lucky to catch your limit at all,” he says. Lai, a San Franciscan who grew up in Vietnam, “is a foodie of the practical kind, who arrives at a barbecue with a sack of oysters, not half a dozen,” according to Estuary‘s editor, a family friend.
Fishers like Lai have been on the quiet frontlines of witnessing transformations to the region’s fisheries since the late 20th century. Jim Cox, a retired charter-boat captain with four decades of experience fishing in the Delta, says that, “Nowadays when you do get a fish on, you’re accomplishing something extremely more difficult than it was 30 or 40 years ago.”
Lai night fishing off San Francisco shore. Photo: Lai Family
For many popular species, like striped bass, the data bear this out. Cox rattles off fishing factoids for the Bay and Delta the way sports buffs recall the stats about famous players and games. “The saltwater species have done pretty well,” Cox adds. He has a deep, frank captain’s voice that I can easily imagine carrying across the calm Delta waters. “But in the Delta itself, the fisheries have really declined.”
Changes to fisheries aren’t always straightforward paths of decline. Take the story of the perennially popular striped bass. It’s one of the most popular sportfish in the Delta, and, like many species, has suffered since the Delta’s water began to flow across the state to irrigate orchards half a century ago. A further 50 years back would land us in the era of a commercial fishery for “stripers.” But 50 years prior to that — in the 1870s — the species did not exist in California. It was introduced from Alabama in 1879 by men hoping the species would take to the ecosystem and provide sporting opportunities. What so many Delta residents now consider a beloved sportfish could be rightly viewed as an invasive species.
Shore fishing in the metropolitan Bay Area. Photo: Zug Zwang, Creative Commons
The rise and fall of striped bass is far from the only change to recreational fishing here in the last century and a half. Apps have replaced almanacs for checking the tides. The continuing drain of freshwater from the Delta to croplands, fruit trees, and cities hundreds of miles south is taking a toll on salmon and stripers alike. Legacy and emerging contaminants are accumulating in the flesh of various species in the Estuary, rendering some near-inedible. The specter of overfishing certain species lingers. These changes make it perhaps all the more impressive that sportfishing has remained as a regional pastime over the decades that have rendered everything from transportation to entertainment to communication unrecognizable.
At its core, fishing for pleasure seems almost unchanged, a pocket of life in the slow lane that has resisted the speeding-up of modern times. Cox offered an example of an acquaintance who hopes he doesn’t catch anything when he goes fishing: “He just wants to be out there and left alone.”
In a 1960 California Department of Fish and Game booklet called Inshore Fishes of California, one of the authors describes “one of the most contented persons [he] ever met” as an angler with a similar philosophy on fishing: ‘It really doesn’t matter if I catch anything. I enjoy the relaxation and peace of mind I get on my fishing trips.’”
Fisher Roger Mammon’s preferred method of cooking fish is what he calls “Chinese style,” with ginger, green onions, sesame oil, and soy sauce. But he releases most fish he catches now back to the ecosystem. Photo: Mike Hall
Still, the enduring spirit of fishers in the Bay and Delta does not bely the seriousness of the declining populations of many sportfish species. As the few seasoned sportfishers who recall the Bay and Delta of the mid-1900s grey and fade away, the reality they remember will fade as well. There’s data, of course, but it sometimes serves as a poor counterweight to lived experience and memory.
Roger Mammon has a hefty dose of both. A founding member of advocacy group Restore the Delta and president of the West Delta Chapter of the California Striped Bass Association, he has fished throughout the region for more than 70 years. “I get on social media and I see these people posting about catching fish and how great things are,” says Mammon. “They just don’t know what it used to be.”
Top photo: Fishing in Franks Tract in the Delta. Photo: Brett Milligan
Sierra Garcia is an interdisciplinary marine scientist and environmental writer with a focus on oceans, climate, and communities. She is Estuary's multiplatforms editor, and does outreach and planning as well as some reporting for the magazine. Her work has appeared in publications serving a wide range of audiences, including Grist, JSTOR Daily, and the Oxford Climate Review. She was proudly born and raised in Monterey County.
Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...
Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems. Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...
Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.