26 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY DECEMBER 18-24, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Local crab for the holidays is mostly off the table. Meanwhile, fishers are still out on the water—here’s where to find them, and what to look for. By Katie Rodriguez Buy Local It’s a sunny morning in December and the rockfish and black cod are showing up in good numbers, hungry. At the docks in Moss Landing, Walter Deyerle, who fishes as part of a family fleet, offloads his catch from the boat straight into the back of a wholesale-to-the-public fish market his family opened in late 2023. The rockfish—specifically, vermillion rockfish, also known as “red snapper” or “rock cod”—are fresh, the red color vibrant and the fins twitching in the ice bucket. “The populations are really healthy,” Deyerle says. “The problem is it’s not crab or salmon or tuna.” Other species simply don’t match the market interest that salmon and crab have historically, the seasonal timing of which (salmon for summer and crab for winter) fell during prime times of years to sell their catch for a decent price. The story isn’t new—for nearly seven years, the commercial Dungeness crab season has frequently been delayed until after the holiday season, often due to the presence of migrating whales and occasionally due to elevated marine toxins like domoic acid poisoning. For commercial Chinook salmon fishing, it’s been Top left: The Sea Harvest boat waits near the docks in Moss Landing on Tuesday, Nov. 25 after a morning out fishing for a mix of rockfish and sablefish. Sea Harvest is a family-owned business with a family fishing fleet, restaurants and a wholesale market. Top right: Squid hangs off a line of hooks, used as bait, on a Sea Harvest boat on a sunny morning at Moss Landing. Below: Daniel Alvarez, a fisherman with Sea Harvest, pushes a container attached to a hoist off the docks at Moss Landing that will offload the morning’s catch. Photos by Daniel Dreifuss
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