The Old Man and the Sea A Walk Down Memory Lane with the Patriarch of Royal Seafood October 2006

by Don Huntington
Images by Russell Byrne & Henry Benson

A combination of bureaucratic bungling, overzealous conservation and international market conditions has had what the owners of Royal Seafood describe as a devastating effect on the Monterey Bay’s longest-standing business. The founder of Royal Seafood, Giuseppe (Joe) Pennisi, has been turning the once-thriving business over to his son, Gino. They’ve had to make so many adjustments to the changing fishing business environment that the elder Pennisi is no longer convinced commercial fishing will remain a viable business.

I spoke with the two Pennisis and got the story of Joe’s extraordinary life as an icon of the Monterey fishing industry together with their thoughts about where the industry is headed these days.

Joe Pennisi began fishing with his dad, Giovanni, in Monterey Bay when he was 16 years old. The first year was rough, he says, because he kept getting seasick. He spent many hours bobbing up and down on the waters of the Northern California Coast while feeding the fish his slightly used lunches and feeling absolutely awful.

Joe says that his dad was no tyrant and took pity on his situation. He encouraged him to quit fishing and find something to do ashore that wouldn’t make him sick all the time. But Joe stuck it out until he finally got his sea legs and his stomach began to behave itself. He wouldn’t quit, he said, because his father was a good man and Joe enjoyed the experience of working by his side. Also, fishing was probably in his blood. Joe doesn’t know how far back fishing goes in his family. His grandfather was certainly a fisherman in Sicily, where his family originated, as was his great-grandfather before him.

Life in America; Family in Sicily
When the 20th Century dawned, the world began to change. Following the First World War, Giovanni joined the throngs from Sicily in moving to this country. For decades Giovanni’s heart remained in Sicily. Every two or three years he would go back to Sicily for six months. On one of those trips he married Joe’s aunt, Grace. But before they started a family, Grace died. This was the beginning of a strange story because, for reasons known only to her, Grace had made Giovanni promise in the event of her death to marry her youngest sister, Giuseppa Vasta, who wasn’t even a teenager at that time. This sister eventually became Joe’s mom.

So Giovanni continued to lead his two-world existence, fishing in California for a few years and then returning to Sicily for six months while watching his betrothed grow into a woman. When Giuseppa finally turned 18, Giovanni married her, probably with a sigh of relief. However, she continued to live in Sicily and he in California. Each time he returned for one of his periodic visits Giuseppa would get pregnant. Three visits produced three offspring of which Joe was the youngest.

The Second World War brought an extended separation to the family. Giovanni left after his final visit to Sicily before the war when Joe was only six months old; Joe didn’t see his father again until he was nine. Giovanni finally sent for his family to join him in America in 1947. Joe’s mom, his two sisters, and he crossed the Atlantic on an old transport called the Marine Shark. They almost didn’t make the crossing successfully because they ran into a terrible storm. Some passengers and crew members died, and the ship lost its launches and radio antennas.

The violent waves actually cracked the hull and the cold waters of the Atlantic came rushing in. The crew had to seal the whole section off from the rest of the ship behind watertight doors. They spent 16 days at sea and Giovanni actually got an awful telegram from the ship’s representative: “NO CONTACT FROM SHIP STOP FEAR THE WORST.”

Nine-year-old Joe, in childlike fashion, thought the trip was kind of fun. The ship was rolling heavily from side-to-side in a manner that terrified the adults. He and the other children, however, would carry empty suitcases to a wide place on the ship and then sit in them and ride from one side of the boat to the other. “From our perspective,” Joe said, “the heaving of the boat was more fun than a ride in an amusement park.”

The family was eventually reunited in Monterey and two other sisters were subsequently born on American soil.

Down to the Sea
In 1955, Joe began fishing alongside his dad for a man named Howard Lowe. By that time, Giovanni had been fishing in American waters for 37 years. Except for his early seasickness, Joe was having a great time during those early years! Life was full of challenges, experiences, and adventure. He remembers that he didn’t care about whatever money he was earning because he was working for his love of the work and of the sea.

Everything changed when Joe’s dad died suddenly of a heart attack at the relatively youthful age of 65 when Joe was only 22. His two youngest sisters weren’t even teenagers yet and he himself was about to get married. Life suddenly imposed a new level of responsibility upon the young man. Giovanni had always taken care of the nets and boats, for example, while Joe simply fished. But Joe recalls that he suddenly discovered that if he left the nets lying somewhere in the evening, that’s just where they would be when he came back in the morning. If the boat didn’t have any diesel fuel when he got off, it would still be out of fuel when he got back on.

Joe began growing up fast. But he went right to work. He soon bought the business from Howard Lowe, added some more boats, and Royal Seafood began to prosper. As Joe matured in the fishing industry he began to make improvements with gear and marketing practices. The company became exceedingly successful, and he invested profits in buying the premises the company was located on, plus a freezer plant, a store, and two more boats. At one time Royal Seafood had more than 200 employees – 40 of them working right here on Wharf #2.

When he bought the freezer plant Joe recalls that it was processing 10,000 pounds of fish a day. Joe added innovations and upgrades that eventually boosted production by more than a thousand percent because, at its height, the plant had a daily output of 120,000 pounds of fish. The plant mainly processed squid, but they also did anchovies, and various bottom fish.

Nothing ever stays the same in the fishing business. Joe says that he began fishing right at the end of the sardine industry. They fished for sardines for two seasons and during one of them didn’t make anything. It was the end of an industry. There were over 100 big boats in Monterey, called seiners, that were rigged up for sardines. But the fish themselves all disappeared.

Joe says that the fish were driven away by a drop in water temperature. Scientists have taken core samples in the Santa Barbara channel and found a temperature fluxation that has followed a previously unsuspected 40-60 year cycle throughout the millennia, apparently. The fish left 50 years ago. The higher water temperatures returned two decades ago and brought back with them the wayward Monterey sardines, but the area canneries are gone forever. Sources in Mexico and Canada have taken over the industry.

Following the sardines’ disappearing act, many of the seiners were sold to fisheries stretching from Southern California to India. A few of them were converted locally to trawlers. Joe’s dad and a partner had converted one of these, an 80-foot boat called the American Rose. They sold it a few years later, in 1961, and it was taken to Peru.

Now Joe is back down to one boat – the original one that he and his dad had bought when he was 19. It is called the San Giovanni after his father.

Sidestepping Death
During all his decades of fishing Joe says that he never lost a boat. Royal Seafood boats had a number of close calls but were fortunate in never meeting with a real disaster.

As difficult as it is to believe, Joe says that they snagged a nuclear sub with their fishing nets on two separate occasions! The first time it happened to his original boat. The sub fouled their nets and began to drag the boat. They were going through the water about 20 knots! Sideways! It was the fastest that trawler ever moved! Fortunately the dog on the winch finally broke and let the cable all run out. The damage to the boat and to Joe’s business was $145,000.

The next year the same thing happened. It was early morning and the boat was towing nets. Joe was standing watch at the wheel by himself. He didn’t even realize the sub was there; the boat simply stopped and then began backing through the water. The cables began surfacing.

Joe called the Coast Guard, but they were no help. “It might be a submarine,” he told them. They assured him there was no sub in the area. They obviously didn’t know what they were talking about because before long a huge nuclear submarine surfaced near the boat. That time the Navy paid $250,000 for repairs and loss of business. Joe said that he had to go to Virginia and explain everything to the Navy brass, but two weeks later they sent him the check.

Joe once brought up an unexploded depth charge in his nets. He brought the dangerous thing in to the Coast Guard, and they made the boat remain a mile offshore. The Coast Guard boarded his boat in the middle of the night, wrapped the depth charge with mattresses, and hauled it to Fort Ord. They later told him that seven pounds of pressure would have set it off. “If we had dropped that thing onto the deck when we pulled it in nobody would ever have known what became of us,” Joe said.

Hard Times
The city took Joe’s freezer plant away from him by an act of eminent domain. The facility came in at an assessed value of $2.8 million but the city’s offer came in at $900,000. He said he paid a lawyer $100,000 to push the payment up to $1,250,000.

Gino says that everything’s going downhill in the Monterey fishing industry. The government now publishes lists of quotas that fishermen have to stick with. The National Marine Fisheries adjusts the quotas on the basis of ongoing population studies through a process called “Federal Groundfish Management.” A problem with the system is that bureaucrats make decisions on the basis of a lot of misinformation, Gino said. Their attitude is that they would rather be wrong for the right reasons.

Joe and Gino think that the government is wrong too often. “Scientists sometimes have the opinion that fishermen are dumb, but fishing is what we do. This is not what scientists do.” Gino said that if you put a fisherman in a science lab he wouldn’t know his way around. But stick a scientist in a fishing boat and the same thing might happen. They’ve seen scientists fishing for species that the Pennisis know aren’t even in the area. “We see them doing bottom surveys and fishing for rockfish where we know there has never been rockfish,” Gino said.

“They create catch histories that they then extrapolate from, but too often they’re using wrong data,” Gino said. “They go fishing and don’t catch anything. They don’t say, as we have always said, ‘They aren’t biting today.’ What they say is ‘This is over fished.’”

One set of scientists hired Gino’s boat, “Irene’s Way,” to do a salmon research charter. The scientists had brought their own equipment but had rigged their gear improperly. When Gino tried to intervene they resisted his suggestions. Finally, Gino told them, “If you don’t let me fix your gear, I’m going to take you all back to the dock.” They finally got permission to let Gino make the changes and ended up getting more salmon than they had on any survey they ever took. If Gino hadn’t fixed their gear, the scientists would have reported salmon to be all fished out in that area.

These are tough times for Monterey fishermen. There used to be a lot more hustle and bustle around the wharf. Boats were unloading all the time. A large crew of cutters was employed just to clean fish. “Now there are only two of us fish cutters,” Gino said. “We might get our bi-monthly quota in a week or less and then have to sit here with our boat tied up to the buoy for the remainder of the two months.”

“We would love to keep the fish market going but we don’t know if we’re going to make it,” Gino said. “We have to create other avenues for the business. Our fixed overhead is more than we can afford with rising fuel, labor, insurance, repairs to the boat…. A lot of times there isn’t anything left.”

Local fishermen have competition from Canada, which imposes no tariffs or taxes on the industry. In fact, Gino said that the Canadian government subsidizes fuel costs for Canadian fishermen. Gino says that he can catch a rockfish, process it, and residents can still buy a Canadian fish for less than that Monterey fish costs. “We should get subsidized like the farmers do,” Gino says. “We should be like an ag business.”

Moving on
Joe turned the business over to his son, Gino, a few years ago. “Next stop is the cemetery,” Joe says with a rueful smile. He says he misses the days when he was in charge. A skipper is a dictator who needs to enforce discipline to keep crewmembers from being hurt or killed. “I spent my life being in control,” he says. Life was always an adventure.

“We had six boys and two girls, which provided adventures of a completely different sort,” Joe says. “But that’s a story for another time.”

Joe was very active all his life. “We sometimes worked 18 to 20 hours in a day. I thought nothing of it; it was just natural.” Now he says that he gets up in the morning when he feels like it and there is no hurry to go anywhere.

“My 90-year-old mom calls me up to make sure that I’ve eaten,” he says with a chuckle. “That’s my excitement for the morning.”

Joe says that he shows up at the wharf and will sometimes go out fishing, but the old days are gone with the wind.

“The next generation is picking up where we leave off,” he says. He wishes them well. “I’m afraid that it isn’t going to be easy for them. But then, it wasn’t always easy for us.”

“Life is always a challenge. That’s just the way things are.”°

Note: Just as we were going to press, the state Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously to create 29 underwater protected areas covering more than 200 square miles of ocean and bay between Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz counties. This includes substantial new off-limits and reduced-catch areas in the Monterey Bay area. Environmental groups and the Monterey Bay Aquarium had hoped for more extensive protected areas while commercial fishermen like Royal Seafood fear that these new controls were unnecessary and will further jeopardize their industry.