“The long term health of the fishery? There’ll be lobsters to catch, it just depends on the [ocean] cycles – if it’s warm water, cold water. And then you’re going to hope for a bleed off out of the closures, because that’s helped out quite a bit in the last few years. And then we have to rely on the weather. [If] we don’t have the weather, they’re not going to be there either. We’ll see what happens.”

“The quality of [the fishing life] is awesome, once you’re out on the water, doing what we do. I can’t miss it for anything. I’ll take the stakes, I’ll risk my life, whatever I can. I love fishing. It’s a challenge, but it’s worth the challenge.”

“I think we all try to get along as best we can. Of course, at times we all have our issues, but as far as trying to work together – if something was to happen to somebody else, oh, we’re right there on top of it. We’re going to go help somebody else; there’s no doubt in my mind.”

“[Local marine resources] would be a lot more abundant if we’d be able to spread out, if we had more turf to fish. But we’re all in one big corner now. We’ve had good years, but I’ve watched it decline over the last six or seven years and [we] used to have a lot more diversity but everything’s just kind of been taken away. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“It’s not just the restrictions on access like the permit values and being able to acquire a permit for a value set, but the convoluted nature of how people get into fisheries now, whether it’s maybe an overpriced permit or some screwed up lottery system.”

“Everyone has a secondary means of employment or of financial stability because of the fact that fishing is no longer the mainstay. It’s hard to derive a sole livelihood from fishing anymore in Orange County.”

“The tariffs were a big hit the last three years, lowered [the price for lobster] from $17.50 on an opener to $11 – that was huge because there goes all the money. We’re hoping to put some money in the bank, but then it’s all gone once [the tariffs] come back around.”

“We actually have no commercial infrastructure [in Dana Point]. We have no ice machines. The restrooms at the top of the dock are locked and aren’t even open till seven o’clock in the morning, so we can’t even use the facilities if we were to need them. [. . .] Our parking is limited. We have nowhere to store gear. The county is nice enough to allot 18 or 20 docks for the commercial guys, but we have absolutely no support mechanisms such as winches. We don’t even have a large, wide ramp where we can go down and load a large load of traps – I think it’s about a three foot wide ramp. So even that’s very, very difficult.”

“Well, Newport Beach, there’s no place to dock your boat, period. You can get a private dock for $500 a month if you’re lucky, or you can go to a private facility and pay another fortune there per month [. . .] We have to go all the way back to the wharf which takes an hour one way to unload gear and pick up bait and you can’t pick up bait or offload at public docks. It’s a joke. I mean, you can’t can’t do anything in the harbor.”

“Our community at Dana Point actually has a lobster festival which happens two weeks prior to our opening of our fishery, and they don’t even use our Pacific spiny lobsters. They bring in lobsters from Maine and to me, that’s ridiculous. Support us as fishermen in your local community; sell our lobsters, do it within our season. [. . .] But with that lobster fest, it would have opened up the knowledge that we have lobster in the Pacific Ocean. You talk to most people – they don’t even know that we have [a lobster fishery]. They’re like ‘what? They don’t even have claws? You have lobsters here?’”

“The compaction kills us because we’re all fishing in one little area to try to get what little bit [of resource] is able to come out of [the MPAs] in the Orange County region.”

“Fishing sheephead is not just a marketing strategy. It’s also diminishing the amount of predation you would get on the lobsters and your lobster traps [. . .] now our lobsters get pretty predated upon by sheephead on a regular basis. That’s a whole other issue that we had to deal with. So as far as abundance of resources, there’s resources there, it’s our inability to be able to harvest them.”

“I was always sitting and listening and watching [during the MPA planning meetings], and I could tell by the atmosphere in those meetings that they didn’t even care that we were there. [. . .] I just didn’t feel like we needed to even be there because we weren’t being listened to.”

“What are we managing? Because with the Cowcod Conservation Areas and all the closures we did for the rockfish closures, we had an agenda. Our agenda was to reestablish, rehabilitate the diminished boccaccio species and then the cowcod [. . .] Are we managing the social and economic part of the fishermen and making sure that they stay out of [the MPAs]? The bottom line is [the environmentalists’] agenda is different from ours. And as far as the management, I see like CDFW and all the politics of the state are managing us out of our livelihoods, and we’re just trying to survive.”

“There’s not opportunity [for fishermen involvement in MPA monitoring]. I’m one of few vessels only because I lobby hard and I pushed hard to do a little bit of tagging.”

“I like the wardens, and we actually have a good relationship with them. And if you talk to them about [MPA enforcement], they’ll say it’s budget concerns and they can’t get paid their overtime money if they go out there and work and try to catch someone. And that just seems pretty sad that the state is at that point that they won’t give them the money to enforce the laws.”