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1. Port-at-a-Glance

A port on California’s central coast, the settlement of Monterey was established in 1769. However, Monterey has been an important area for the Ohlone/Costanoan people and their use of natural resources for thousands of years. An historically significant city, Monterey was the capital of Spanish California and the location where the state’s constitution was signed in 1849. Like many ports in California, Monterey’s diverse immigrant population started the commercial fishing industry in the second half of the 1800s. In the 1930s and 1940s Monterey was the center of a thriving fishing industry at Cannery Row and was known as the “Sardine Capital of the World.” The Monterey waterfront suffered after the crash of the sardine fishery but experienced a revitalization after it was popularized by author John Steinbeck in the 1945 novel Cannery Row.

Fishing has remained one of Monterey’s most important sectors both economically and culturally, although the fisheries on which it has been most dependent have shifted over time. By the late 2010s, important fisheries for the port include market squid, coastal pelagic species and spot prawn. The spot prawn and groundfish fisheries became more important in the 1960s and 1970s as trawl technologies improved. When spot prawn trawlers were outlawed in 2003, the fishery shifted exclusively to traps and has continued to grow as a low-volume high-value fishery. Groundfish was once an important year-round fishery for the port, however, the West Coast-wide fishery was declared a federal fishery disaster in 2000 following a sharp decline in landings of these species and overcapitalization in the fishery (Source).

Since 2010, the market squid fishery expanded at the port. In 2021, market squid was the port’s primary fishery by both weight and ex-vessel value. From 2002 to 2021, the number of fish business licenses active in Monterey decreased by almost half. The number of commercial fishing licenses associated with the port decreased from 213 in 2000 to 72 in 2018. In 2021, landings at Monterey accounted for 18% of California’s total landings.