On Oregon’s coast, Port Orford fishers are changing how we eat seafood

On the only road down to the Port of Port Orford, home to a fleet of about 30 commercial fishing vessels, you’ll pass a memorial to local mariners who died at sea.

The harborless port is tucked next to steep, weather-beaten sea cliffs along a cloud-enshrined shoreline. As you watch 50-ton yellow cranes hoist boats in and out of the ocean, an operator tells you this is one of six dolly docks in the entire world.

You won’t find a vessel bigger than 42 feet long and 25,000 pounds, the same weight as an empty garbage truck. The cranes can’t handle more. Such limitations help foster a sustainable fishing community.

On days when the port turns into a seafood market, you can buy lingcod and halibut and albacore straight from the women and men who caught them. You’ll meet their fishing vessels too: My Girl, Good News, Crystal Sea, Lynoma, Fantasy and New Mohay.

Today, as long as the weather is good — and despite rising gear costs, the relentless bone-chilling sea, and global markets that favor boatloads of cheap seafood over small-scale sustainability — the fishers will launch their vessels toward a great and unknown horizon.

The lemonade stand

The Galley, a seafood kitchen near the port, is winding down from a lunch rush when a customer, an older guy, walks up to the wooden counter.

“So you want all the lingcod we got, that’s 23 pounds,” says Galley manager Barbie Black, punching the total in a cell phone-sized sales system.

The Galley is part of Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, or POSS as it’s known locally, a company launched in 2009 by fishermen vying to keep their catch local and traceable, ensure fair pay and sell directly to customers through prepaid seafood shares.

To become a member, customers create an account and make a deposit upfront on the online marketplace. You don’t have to order every month. You can buy 20 pieces of salmon or a single piece of rockfish.

“You’re in control of what your share is,” owner Kean Fleming said. 

POSS delivers member seafood orders the first week of every month to 21 drop-off locations across the state, including Oakshire Brewing in Eugene.

As one of Oregon’s only community-supported fisheries, POSS works regularly with eight local fishermen and serves more than 400 members throughout Oregon. The fishermen just need to drop off their catch. The crew cuts, vacuum seals and distributes the seafood. Packages of fish often have the name and picture of the angler who caught it.

Last year, the company processed about 100,000 pounds of Pacific seafood: albacore, rockfish, dungeness crab, lingcod, chinook salmon, sablefish (also known as black cod).

The company has survived, Fleming said, due to what he calls “stick-to-it-iveness.”

When POSS wasn’t making enough money a few years ago, he and fish cutter Brian Morrissey thought, “Let’s sell food.”

They bought a fryer and a small broiler and started cooking the fishermen’s catch, eventually turning the kitchen into one of POSS’s main revenue sources, alongside wholesale and seafood shares.

Known as the Galley, its menu is small — no more than three or four items, dependent on the daily catch.

Fleming doesn’t know how much fish he’s getting even a few days out. POSS, like much of the city, doesn’t operate on a set schedule, but on a string of “hopefullys”: Hopefully the weather holds up. Hopefully the fish aren’t hiding. Hopefully the catch is abundant.

Sandwiched between the coast and Oregon State University’s Port Orford Field Station, POSS’s headquarters is a little bigger than a one-car garage. The space acts as a kitchen, a processing facility, a shipping point, a seafood market, an office, a commercial holding freezer and, at this moment, the site of a haggling match.

“If I buy 5 pounds of halibut, what kind of deal are you going to make me?” the man asks. 

Fleming makes a few mental calculations. “I can give you a buck off per pound. That’s $5 off,” he says, and then adds, “We’ll also give you a free bag of fish-skin pet treats.”

The Galley recently started making these to reduce waste.

And then Fleming offers: “Barbie’s probably got some stickers.”

The customer declines the stickers. 

Fleming gets up from one of the Galley’s picnic tables and begins rummaging through the kitchen for more random add-ons: half a bag of fish-fry breading mix, a couple of limes, plums.

“What else you got in your pantry?” the customer asks, amused. 

He takes the $5-off deal, plus a few pantry items.

“We wheel. We deal,” Fleming says. “It’s kind of like a lemonade stand here, except with fish.”

A port in transition

As one of the port’s electric cranes swiveles toward him, Phillip Russum secures thick lifting strips along four points of the boat he uses to fish for black cod and crab. 

It’s time to test his new motor.

“I’m kind of worried,” the commercial fisherman says, chuckling.

Russum just bought an efficient — and powerful — 350-horsepower outboard. If the motor is throttled with too much power, the boat could capsize, which happened to a friend of his.

“Everyone survived,” Russum says, “but barely.”

On this morning, as long as the boat doesn’t tip over, Russum’s plan is to catch black cod and sell it to POSS by early afternoon.

In a few days, he’ll head back out for albacore tuna on the Crystal Sea, another of his four active boats. He’ll sell that catch at a different venue: the Port Orford Seafood Market.

Launched last summer by a local fishermen’s cooperative, the Port Orford Seafood Market is held right at the port. People from all over Oregon, and out of state, drive hours to get there, coolers in tow, for a chance to meet local fishermen and buy their fresh catch. Fish cutters are on site to process purchases.

Surrounded by crab pots and moored fishing vessels, Russum and five other anglers pack giant totes with massive diamond-shaped halibut, redbanded rockfish, silver-bodied albacore and black cod.

Both the Port Orford Seafood Market and POSS are fishermen-founded and have the same goal: bring customers closer to the people who harvest their food. And by shortening the supply chain, fishermen retain more of the profits.

The models just look a little different: When you receive a POSS seafood box, you’ll see the name and picture of the angler who caught it. But at the popup port-side market, you can meet them face-to-face.

“We’re connecting seafood from catch to table, showing where it comes from, how it’s caught,” says Russum, 41. 

Local seafood is somewhat of a catch-22 in the United States, including in Oregon: About 80% of the seafood Americans consume is imported. And the majority of what is caught here is sent off to other countries.

Much of it boils down to infrastructure. Without more facilities to affordably process seafood, fish fillets from international suppliers become a lot cheaper. 

“We’ve got a huge gap,” Russum says. “We can’t access those [global] supply chains. Especially in this area, being as small as we are, we don’t have that connection. We need to find another way to make up for it.”

Becoming a true seafood hub requires facilities for cutting and packing and shipping the seafood, as well as a commercial kitchen, seawater access to hold live seafood, cold storage and a regular seafood market.

To get there, the Port of Port Orford is banking on an $11.85 million proposal to transform the working dock into an all-in-one facility, where fish are caught, processed, stored and cooked. Permanent dockside markets would also sell fish that are freshly-harvested or kept alive in seawater tanks. Port officials submitted plans to the Maritime Administration in June for funding.

The project would also add jobs to Port Orford, where the median household income is $37,000, less than half the national average.

The port is making some progress: It was just approved a $500,000 project to install a seawater pump for live seafood market sales. Plus, the Port Orford Seafood Market is driving up revenue for fishermen.

“Our dock sales right now have been my main support,” Russum says. “It’s what’s gotten me through the summer.”

50 feet down, a 20-armed predator feasts

Near the port, in mid-August, scientists with the Oregon Kelp Alliance carried more than 70 sunflower sea stars to the bottom of Nellies Cove.

After weeks of collecting and preparing the wild sea stars for their new home, the team transported them in a ventilated cage and let them acclimate to the cove. When the team returned a day later to release them, they observed something striking: Scores of purple sea urchins — the sea star’s natural prey — had scattered from the cage.

Sunflower sea stars keep sea urchin populations in check. But in 2013, an epidemic of sea star wasting disease hit the Pacific Coast. Within the decade, more than 90% of the species were wiped out, from Mexico to Alaska.

The ecological dominoes fell quickly: Without their sticky-footed predator, purple sea urchins multiplied and smothered the seafloor. They devoured the bull kelp, warping a once-lush underwater canopy into an urchin wasteland. 

Purple sea urchins can live for over a year without eating. Whenever they detect bull kelp, the spiny crustaceans will wake from their energy-saving stupor to feast before the seaweed has a chance to grow, much less fully recover.

Like trees, kelp are not just a single species but a habitat for thousands of marine creatures: Kelp forests serve as a shelter and nursery for rockfish and salmon, home to crabs and snails and sea stars, hunting grounds and hiding spots. Without kelp, the ocean floor turns bleak, lifeless.

That, in turn, hurts the livelihoods of fishermen. 

A sunflower sea star preys on a purple sea urchin:

“Especially after the mass kelp die-off that we had, the work Oregon Kelp Alliance is doing is important to the ecosystem we make a living on,” Russum says. “One of our main fisheries is on these reefs, and we fish the kelp beds, so we see the impact.”

Restoring Oregon’s sunflower sea star population is one step to helping kelp grow back, says Tom Calvanese, executive director of the Oregon Kelp Alliance. The goal is to restore enough sea stars, which he calls “kelp forest defenders,” to maintain the reef’s ecological balance without further human intervention.

“We need a sustainable, nature-based solution,” Calvanese says.

Another way to address the bull kelp crisis? Eat more purple sea urchins.

Calvanese, along with other commercial divers, started plucking starving sea urchins from the ocean and feeding them in tanks until their custard-like gonads — better known as uni — fatten up. 

Oregon Kelp Alliance uses the delicacy as an educational tool: At outreach events, Calvanese and other scientists will crack open the urchin’s shell and let folks taste the rich, briny uni. 

“That captures a lot of people’s imagination,” Calvanese says, “because, you know, food.”

The fisherman feeds people

Russum started commercial fishing when he was 17. During the last 24 years, he’s survived market price drops, overfishing disasters, frigid waters, massive waves and constantly changing fishery regulations.

Right now, he’s throwing about $40,000 toward new crab lines due to recent changes in color-coding requirements for commercial pots.

“It’s pretty tough, especially for crabbers,” he says. “We got guys going out of business because expenses keep going up.”

Despite economic pressures, he’s donated thousands of pounds of his catch over the years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he delivered truckloads of tuna to healthcare workers at the hospital where his sister worked.

In recent years, he’s given hundreds of pounds to the local food bank. The Port Orford Seafood Market is another way for fishermen to donate unsold fish.

The donations are partly an economic protest: Instead of selling rockfish for 50 cents a pound — which wouldn’t cover his costs, much less turn a profit — he’s feeding his community.

Besides fighting hunger, free seafood also helps fishermen drive up local demand — and prices — for undervalued species such as black cod.

In early August, during the Blessing of the Fleet, an annual event for Port Orford residents to wish commercial fishermen a safe and bountiful season and honor those who died at sea, Russum and other fishers prepared free samples of black cod: They made ceviche, smoked pieces, and grilled miso fillets for attendees, some of whom had never tried the fish before.

“Now we’ve gotten more demand for it than we ever had,” he says.

‘No Port Orford without the port’

When Aaron Longton, the founder of POSS, moved to Port Orford in 2000, the West Coast groundfish industry had been declared a federal disaster. Ten of the fishery’s species’ populations dropped below healthy levels due to overfishing. Strict catch limits and closures soon followed. 

For the next 25 years, Longton worked alongside conservationists, government officials and other commercial fishermen to restore the groundfish populations.

“Without adequate science, we have nothing,” Longton said in a video by the Hatfield Marine Science Center. “We’d all be out there fishing for the last fish.”

As board president of a fishermen-run nonprofit in Port Orford, he promoted sustainable fisheries and marine biodiversity protections. He spoke vehemently about ocean acidification and warming. He supported science-based catch limits and assessments on the ecological impacts of commercial fishing.

“Aaron saw the value of protecting things,” says Fleming, the current POSS owner.

Aaron Henry Longton, Port Orford man, born in Roseburg, captain of the Golden Eye, founder of a lasting community-supported fishery, and in his words, “a fisherman, hippie bluegrass rock aficionado and ‘Boaterhome’ owner hopeful”, died Jan. 15 in a crash on Highway 58 near Oakridge. He’d been delivering POSS seafood boxes. He was 64.

In a story announcing his death, journalist and Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler called Longton “a fisherman who tied sustainability to survival.”

Shortly before his death, Longton bought a dehydrator so POSS could start making pet treats from fish skin to reduce waste.

“He haunts this place,” says Morrissey, the POSS fish cutter and chef at the Galley, half-joking, while prepping a miso black cod bowl. “One time he made me drop a bunch of stuff. It’s like he never left, almost.”

There’s the time he “fixed” the sink, Barbie Black said. (The faucet handle doesn’t work now, so they have to turn it on from underneath the sink, and the water always runs hot.)

And Longton used to text Black at 6 a.m. most days, sometimes with work questions, but usually to tell a dad joke.

“It was annoying,” Black said, laughing. “But now, of course, I miss it. He wasn’t just a boss, he was a friend.”

Keeping Oregon seafood local

Last October, three months before Longton died, the federal NOAA Fisheries declared the last species of the 2000 groundfish crisis, the yelloweye rockfish, rebuilt.

The fisherman approached the news with cautious optimism, telling Mongabay, “As we open things back up, we’re going to have to be real methodical about how it’s done. If we go in with the same attitude we did before, you know, it won’t be long before we depress [groundfish numbers] again.”

Not every angler survived that era of slashed quotas and fishing bans. To this day, amid gear costs, unpredictable seasons and bad weather, fluctuating market prices and annual regulation changes, Russum has seen fellow Port Orford anglers go out of business.

But just down the road at the community-supported fishery Longton helped build, the Galley is in full swing.

On this sunny, 65-degree afternoon in August, Russum stops by with a tote of black cod he caught that morning. He weighs his catch in the same kitchen where he still packages seafood donations. Longton had opened up the facility to Russum a few years back, letting him safely process fish for the local food bank. 

While Russum scoops ice onto his catch, Morrissey broils miso-marinated cuts of the buttery fish. Fleming fluffs a steaming batch of rice, fogging up the kitchen like dry ice. Not long after, he looks around and asks, “Where’s Phil?”

No one saw Russum leave, but he must have. Must have headed back down the only road to the port, driving past the Golden Eye, as he always does, to ready his boat for the next launch into the Pacific.

Hopefully, if the weather holds, he’ll find schools of albacore and hook into their torpedo bodies one by one. Just enough to fill his boat with another day’s catch.

Snapshots of Port Orford