Where Are the Sardines?

"In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. . . . Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. . . . The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is ...canned ...and the dripping, smelly, tired . . . men and women straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again--quiet and magical."

Since John Steinbeck thus described it in Cannery Row two years ago, California's famed fishing town of Monterey (130 miles south of San Francisco) has had a surfeit of quiet and magic. By last week, the fishing fleet in the sardine center of the U.S. had dwindled from 85 to 55 boats. Hardly any whistles blew along Cannery Row. "We just keep open," said the owner of one of its 59 plants, "hoping for a few fish to dirty up our canneries." But fish had mysteriously gone from their haunts off Monterey.

Three years ago, Monterey brought in 234,000 tons and San Francisco 136,000 tons--more than two-thirds of California's total. But the next season's catches fell off sharply--to 142,000 tons for Monterey, 83,000 tons for San Francisco. Despite the adoption of such expensive devices as sonar to locate the schools of fish last year's catches slumped even more. Bitter rivals in normal times, the canners banded together, hired a plane and got the Coast Guard to lend another to scout offshore for sardines. By last week, at what is usually the peak of the season, Monterey had brought in only 9,700 tons, hardly enough to keep its canneries busy for a day. And the shortage had hiked the price of sardines from $30 to $45 a ton.

Some northern California fishermen have already gone south to San Pedro, where the catch last season was bigger than usual. Many more were prompted to follow by reports this week from San Pedro, where the first day's catch was the second highest on record. But the canners of northern California, with some $60,000,000 tied up in factory equipment, are much worse off. A few have turned to vegetable canning. But most of them are just waiting despondently for an end to nature's perverse magic.

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