3. Port Governance and Infrastructure

The City of Morro Bay manages the Morro Bay Harbor, which stretches along 1.5 miles of coast. The harbor has four marinas with 400 berths, 50 commercial vessels slips and 150 moorings. Of those, the Morro Bay Harbor Department manages 50 city slips and approximately 125 moorings. The commercial slips are subsidized by the city. Other facilities include a well-established boatyard for maintenance, fuel dock, haul-out, a boat launch, shower and laundry, dry storage and a work yard. Fishing services include a fish cleaning station, bait facility, two ice facilities, four hoists, two cold storage facilities, and seafood buying, processing and retail. In 2009, a specialized offloading pump was installed at the Municipal Dock which supported a growing market squid fishery (Source). Morro Bay Marina offers a variety of services for recreational vessels. The Morro Bay Yacht Club offers an additional six mooring spaces and a 150-foot dock for transient yachts.

Funds from the Santa Barbara County Fisheries Enhancement Fund have helped to improve fishing infrastructure at the harbor. The Morro Bay Commercial Fishermen’s Organization has received two grants: one to pave areas at the harbor for fishing equipment storage and net repair, and a second to upgrade the organization’s computer system for predicting offshore weather patterns and water temperatures (Source).

The Morro Bay National Estuaries Program encompasses the principal wetland system on the south-central coast. The Morro Bay National Estuary Program is a non-regulatory nonprofit that brings together citizens, organizations, and agencies for monitoring, research, conservation and restoration. The Morro Bay estuary provides the eelgrass beds and wetlands that serve as a habitat for several migratory birds and as a nursery for juvenile offshore marine fish. The estuary is home to several aquaculture facilities producing pacific oysters, bay mussels, and manila clams (Source).

3.1 Commercial Seafood Handling Infrastructure

A variety of commercial fish businesses receive, and in some cases, process the catch landed at Morro Bay by commercial fishers (Table 1). These include businesses that lease and operate the fish receiving stations located at Morro Bay Harbor, other local and non-local businesses that receive the unloaded catch from these receiving station operators and some fishers who handle their own (and in some cases others’) catch. In 2021, 24 fish business licensees had a mail, street, or plant address of Morro Bay (Table 1). Thirty-nine unique fish business licenses received catch at the port. Those based in Morro Bay included commercial fishers licensed to receive and sell their catch, and several smaller locally owned receivers that also had retail storefronts and/or restaurants.

Because of local dependence on the high volume, year-round, groundfish fishery, Morro Bay once had an active processing sector with 5 processors in the port in the 1970s. By the 1990s, landings and ex-vessel value were on the decline in Morro Bay and all of the port’s large-scale processors left (Figure 2) (Source). At the same time, the number of fishermen’s retail licenses increased from just 9 in 1993 to 23 by 1998. This is in large part due to the success of the salmon fishery for most of the 1990s and its profitability, and popularity, as a direct sales fishery (Figure 2) (Source: Personal interview, Harbormaster). However, like most ports along the California coast, commercial fish businesses in Morro Bay continued to slowly decline after 2002 (36), with 24 businesses in 2021 (Figure 2). The contraction of the processing sector is in large part due to the 2000 groundfish disaster and subsequent (2003) coastwide federal trawl buyback program and local buyback led by The Nature Conservancy (2006) (Table 2).

With the decline in the year-round, high-volume trawl groundfish fishery, shift to a low volume, high value fixed gear groundfish fisher, and increased dependence on the seasonal Dungeness crab and market squid fisheries, receiving and processing businesses struggled to stay afloat. Furthermore, the salmon fishery went into sharp decline, and fishers were no longer able to buffer their earnings with the salmon direct sales cottage industry. The swordfish fishery, one of the port’s other key fisheries, also went into decline following a brief resurgence in the early 2000s. A hagfish processor was briefly based in Morro Bay in 2014 and 2015, following the start of the fishery in Morro Bay just a few years prior (Figure 2).

Figure 2:  Fish Business Licenses held locally, by type, in Morro Bay, 1993-2021

Table 2: Timeline of selected events affecting Morro Bay’s primary fisheries.