America's commercial fishing fleet is getting old, and the industry is scrambling to work out who will replace the men and women aging out of it. In California, the average commercial captain is now 48, and the pipeline of newcomers has thinned to a trickle.
Nowhere is the shift starker than San Diego. A city once billed as the "Tuna Capital of the World," where 40,000 people once worked in tuna, now counts roughly 130 local commercial fishermen. Only about 10 percent of the seafood eaten in San Diego is landed by local boats.
The economics explain much of the drift away. Median crew pay in the region fell from $90,468 in 2014 to $61,592 in 2024, according to figures cited by CalMatters, while captains' earnings slid from $173,271 to $108,972 over the same decade. San Diego deckhands can make anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 a year — well under the area's $57,083 per capita income.
"It goes to show you that a deckhand in the fishing business can't afford to live in San Diego. And that's the problem we're getting at," said Peter Halmay, an 85-year-old urchin diver who founded the San Diego Fishermen's Working Group.
To widen the pipeline, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego launched an apprenticeship in 2020 to bring outsiders into the trade. Of 11 graduates, six are still fishing. Trainees put in about 130 hours of shore-based instruction — navigation, safety, diesel engine repair, business — before roughly 1,000 hours at sea.
"Fishing isn't just dropping your line in the water. You need to know navigation and safety and fishing and engine repair and business," said Theresa Talley, a coastal specialist with California Sea Grant. She said the effort is "revealing a lot about what needs addressing within the industry, if we really want a resilient, sustainable food system with seafood as a part of it."
Some of the newcomers arrived from careers far from the water. Peter Brownell, a former sociologist, left desk work for the deck. "I definitely was interested in being in the water and operating boats, in my efforts to not be operating a desk," he said. He is candid about the hazard of relying on a single fishery: "Most of what I was making on my own was fishing sanddabs, but then that fishery closed. That's part of the vagaries of commercial fishing, is that you work on something that may not continue to be available to you."
That instability is why Brownell warns the trade is not a soft landing. "If you're entirely reliant on commercial fishing for all your economic needs, that's a hard puzzle to put all the pieces together to make that work consistently year after year," he said.
Darian Schramm traded a programming career for Paramount Fish Co and now mentors apprentices. "I could surf and fish and travel, as a programmer. Then the computer thing just kind of soured for me. Now I'm part of the food system here in San Diego, and I can give back to the community through fresh, local food," he said. His advice to entrants is blunt: "This is getting your feet wet. You can't halfway do it, you have to fully believe in it."
For younger fishermen who stick with it, the rewards are real. Shane Volberding, 27, still remembers where the pull came from. "When I was in Boy Scouts I was the kid catching all the fish and the other kids were wondering, how I was catching all the fish? I had a knack for it," he said. The job, he adds, takes more than a knack: "You gotta be good at fishing. Be smart. Yeah, being good at sales."
Halmay argues the fix is cultural as much as financial. "You've got to change the fishing culture and you have got to make the fishermen and the public appreciate this culture," he said. "These are professionals that take pride in bringing in their catch, and they bring in the best catch and they harvest sustainably because it's in their best interest to do so."
Policymakers have taken some notice. Congress renewed the Young Fishermen's Development Act, which funds training and apprenticeship grants aimed squarely at the graying-fleet problem, earlier this year. Whether workshops and apprenticeships can offset decades of rising costs and shrinking margins is the open question. As Halmay puts it: "We'll get together, and we'll talk about it. We'll share our experiences, and we'll all rise together. And that's how you're gonna succeed is by working together."
