(birds squawking)
- Okay, we're gonna pray.
Come on in.
Lord, I just come before you
and I just pray that you would just bless our trip tonight.
Provide us with an abundance of fish.
And we just thank you for the opportunity
to come out here and make a living.
Jesus name, amen.
- [Narrator] Captain Mikey Retherford is headed out
to catch rockfish with his crew
on the Winona J fishing trawler.
- 6:48 pm, just arriving out to the fishing grounds here.
- [Narrator] For most of his career,
a trip like this was unthinkable.
- [Mikey] Go ahead, start letting it out.
- [Narrator] That's because boats like this
have had to make up for a lot of over fishing in the past.
Too much fishing with these giant trawl nets
led to a devastating collapse in fish population in the 90s.
- This right here is widow rockfish, right there.
That's a very school of fish.
I don't wanna miss it.
Yeah, that's it!
- [Narrator] Widow rockfish were one of
10 different species
that were declared over fished.
- I'm gonna turn, if you're ready.
- [Narrator] Trawl boats like this
were restricted from catching them.
And thousands of miles of the ocean were closed
to help the populations rebuild.
- [Mikey] Okay, pull it.
Yeah, there you go.
- [Narrator] So, these widow rockfish spilling out
onto the deck of the boat,
they were pretty much off limits.
- [Mikey] Now grab one of those pushers.
- [Narrator] And a huge haul like this
was both impossible and illegal.
But on this trip, Mikey Retherford is free
to land 60 thousand pounds of them.
- [Mikey] It's really amazing to see, over a 20 year period,
a incredible comeback of a species.
- [Narrator] So now, he's learning
to catch the fish he used to avoid.
- When I started working, as an adult full time.
I mean it was like, "Oh, we can't catch rockfish."
- [Narrator] His dad started catching rockfish
before the big collapse.
Mike Retherford Sr has been running
the excalibur fishing trawler for over 40 years.
- When I first got into fishing and had my own boat,
we primarily fished rockfish
and that's where we made our living.
- When I was a kid, when the quotas were higher,
he'd go out and just shwack 'em,
come back in with a load of rockfish, you know and so--
- Actually, you got to go one time when
you were like nine or 10.
- I don't remember that.
- You don't remember we went
and shwacked a bunch of Lingcod?
- Yeah, maybe.
- You made like 600 bucks, or something, for a couple days.
- I was in seventh grade.
Coz I came back to school that year with 500--
- Yeah, it was 500 or something bucks.
- Had 500 bucks in my pocket and I was loaded.
(laughing)
I was a rich eighth grader.
(birds squawking)
And then we had the rockfish collapse.
- [Narrator] There were too many boats
and not enough fish to go around.
At one point, things got so bad
the fishing fleet itself killed off its own fishing permits.
Taking nearly a hundred boats off the water for good.
A massive overhaul of fishing regulations
put even more trawlers out of business.
With all the new rules and restrictions,
the fish have bounced back.
But a lot of fishermen haven't.
- As far as my career, I've seen a lot of change
from 400 active trawl vessels on the west coast
to now we are at 50 or 60.
- [Narrator] The fishermen who managed to hang on
by catching other species now have to count
and keep every fish in their net.
With a federal observer on board, policing their catch.
By dragging nets near the seafloor,
ground fish trawlers catch hundreds of species.
And they have their own salty nicknames
to keep track of them all.
- Trying to think of the appropriate ones.
Metridium farcimen, smooth anemone
or 'boobie' in fishermen speak.
I have no idea why they call 'em that.
Use your imaginations.
- That's a shortspine thornyhead.
- [Fisherman] They call 'em bucket heads and idiot fish.
- [Narrator] And scientific surveys, like this one,
biologists like Peter Frey keep a careful count
of each species.
- Little guy's called a pacific grenadier or a rat-tail.
- So, this is a pacific viperfish.
I mean, it's got some serious teeth.
- Our fishermen creatively named these,
well, we call 'em BH's, but stands for (beep) hole.
Real name is (mumbles).
(birds squawking)
- [Narrator] They work with fishermen to sample fish
up and down the coast.
So managers can tell fishermen how much
they're allowed to catch.
- We come out here each year,
we try to standardize everything
as much as possible so that we have a time series of data
that the fishery managers can look at
to figure out what species are up and what species are down.
- [Narrator] They're here to prevent over fishing
in the future and avoid another collapse.
But kind of scientific survey didn't exist until
the fish were already in trouble.
There wasn't a lot of management before the late 90s.
So in the 80s and early 90s,
there were a lot of boats out here fishing really hard
on the rockfish stocks.
That was okay for a while,
but then things really took a downturn.
- [Narrator] Over the years,
these scientists have watched the fish
bounce back from that downturn.
Now their surveys show many
rock fish populations are booming.
- That's a good one.
That's Canary rockfish.
They're another one though
that was just until real recently considered over fished
and we're just seeing a lot more of these in recent years.
They're no longer on the over fish list.
They've really made a comeback since the late 90s
and early 2000 so that's good.
They're beautiful fish too.
- [Narrator] In the past few years,
seven ground fish species have been removed
from the over fished list.
Many of them rebounded decades ahead of schedule,
faster than anyone expected.
And because of all the strict new regulations,
the fishery is now certified sustainable
by the Marine Stewardship Council.
This year manager's doubled the catch limits for fishermen
for several key species.
So for the first time in decades,
fishermen can catch a whole lot of rockfish.
Sounds great, right?
But now there's a new problem.
- And if you look down all those totes,
every one of those totes is different species.
- [Narrator] Seafood processors like Andrew Bornstein
who buy this fish.
Now need to find some new customers.
- Here's a product that's been off the market
for over 20 years.
It is west coast rockfish that's wild.
It's caught by local fishermen.
It's processed right here and people still have a,
"what is it? I don't know that."
So maybe they go for tilapia,
something that they've seen
and they're really familiar with.
We have room to catch way more of our own American resource.
But the American public has just kind of forgotten about us
- [Narrator] Fish markets and restaurants are starting
to adapt to having more rockfish available.
And local ocean seafoods in Newport, customers can buy
whole rock fish at the fish market.
But owner Laura Anderson says
there's still a lot of confusion about which fish is which.
- People will ask, "Is that the same as a sea bass or
"is that the same as a rock cod?"
There's a lot, or even a snapper.
- [Narrator] To make things easier her fish market
also has a restaurant, that serves rockfish and chips
and rockfish tacos.
My favorite way to have chef Enrique prepare the rockfish
is he'll take a full rockfish, scale it (mumbles) it
and deep fry it, the whole thing.
And so when you present that at the table,
it's really, really impressive and fun to eat.
- [Narrator] Whatever you wanna call 'em
and however you want to cook 'em.
Now that their populations have rebounded in the ocean,
rockfish are back on the menu
and back on board fishing boats.
Like the Winonna J.
- Seeing this rebound and fish stocks going up,
something that you were scared to touch now you can harvest
It just brings a lot of hope for the future.