Where did San Diego's fishing go?

Stories Douglas Whyknott wrote for the Reader

Author

By Douglas Whyknott

Publish Date

March 5, 2023

Fisherman works to free dolphins from the tuna nets. If a purse seiner caught a mixed school of yellowfin tuna and dolphins and then let all the dolphins free, the load could be called dolphin-safe. (Dave Bratten)

Flipper victorious
In 1960 San Diego was the most active tuna port in the world. The fleet consisted of about 135 boats. At any given time, 30 or 40 were tied up at the Embarcadero, in port between trips to the tropical grounds, to places as distant as the Galapagos Islands. (May 23, 1996)

You’d never suspect that Sherry Cummings worked hundreds of miles offshore, 12 hours a day, much of it spent hauling and dropping a big water collection device called a rosette, which, when full of samples, weighed 1600 pounds.

Rich sea stew
Over the centuries, two predominant ingredients of the stew have been anchovies and sardines. At about A.D. 575, the anchovy population in the southern California Current was 5 million metric tons (11 billion pounds) but then nearly disappeared shortly before 1300. Since 1970 populations have ranged between 1.6 and 0.3 million metric tons. (November 16, 1995)

Becky Cohen: "I am more than in love. I am hungry, hungry, hungry!"

Light lovers
If a photograph dies and goes to heaven, it might end up here in the breathable vault at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. The prospect for immortality is good, since the temperatures is right, about 60 degrees, and the humidity is right at 40 percent, and the air is fresh, since the vault takes a breath every minute of so. Here at the breathable vault a photograph outlives its subject, outlives the photographer, outlives us all, I suppose. (October 16, 1997)

SeaWorld dolphin show. "It seems to me, walking along, that I’ve become a kind of dolphin myself." (Sandy Huffaker, Jr.)

It's hard to learn about SeaWorld dolphin training
Bill Hoffman says there are husbandry sessions in which, amazingly, the animals present their tail flukes to have blood samples drawn (they are also able to urinate on command — one wonders what the signal is for that). There are learning sessions, when the training is done. There is playtime, and feeding time, and there are “relationship sessions." (February 26, 1998)

Limin Lu and Ben Oppenheimer. Ben Oppenheimer was working on his dissertation, hunting for more brown dwarfs, studying all the stars within 25 light-years of earth. There were about 180 of them.

A night with the astronomer monks of Palomar Mountain
A phone call came in from Rick’s wife—she wanted to say goodnight. “My beautiful wife,” he said when he hung up, smiling. He had a job in astronomy, yes, but he’d sacrificed the goodnight kiss. (December 11, 1997)

These bees flying over Sweetwater have collected enough eucalyptus nectar to make about 40 pounds of honey per hive. (Sandy Huffaker, Jr.)

The cumulative hiss of thousands of wings
There are about 30,000 beehives in San Diego County, and just now, Alan Mikolich and I are standing amid 140 of them. Mikolich is a commercial beekeeper, one of the dozen or so in San Diego County. For his entire adult working life, from the time he was a teenager, Mikolich has worked with bees — six or seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, year-round — moving beehives. Fixing beehives, taking the honey out of beehives. (May 15, 1997)

Douglas Whyknott, who wrote for the Reader from 1995 through 1998, is an 11th-generation Cape Codder. He played blues and jazz piano and formed the Whynott Boogie Trio after studying blues piano with Sammy Price, known as the king of boogie-woogie, in Harlem, New York.

Flipper victorious

Rich sea stew

Light lovers

It's hard to learn about SeaWorld dolphin training

A night with the astronomer monks of Palomar Mountain

The cumulative hiss of thousands of wings