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After decades of offloading their catch to corporate buyers, North County fishermen finally have an outlet for direct community sales.
The brand new Fishermen’s Market of North County has landed in Oceanside Harbor giving fishermen a local platform to bring their catch directly to the community. Piggybacking off the success of Seaport Village’s Saturday Tuna Harbor Dockside Market, Travis Tielens set out to bring a similar concept up north.
Dock to Table
“I’ve always been around commercial fishermen and watched them unload their products onto corporate buyers. People are mesmerized by their catch and don’t understand why it all gets sold to corporations.” Travis wears a black Fishermen’s Market shirt and manages the processing stand at the end of the market with his fiancée. For a small fee, they will process the fish for you and return it wrapped and packed in ice. That way you don’t have to worry about gilling and gutting or fileting the fish yourself. It’s super fresh and ready to be cooked.
“People want to buy the seafood off the fishermen, and they can't because the fishermen’s buyers would frown on it,” Travis says. “Plus there’s just a lot of gray area when dealing with the health department.”
Why is our product being exported to different countries when those resources should be directed to the surrounding community and nourishing the community? You’re hard pressed to find fresh seafood like that being next to the ocean, and it just doesn’t make sense. There’s too much bureaucracy, too much corporate meddling in our resources, and we want to pull it away from the lengthy corporate processes and give the power back to the people.
– Founder Travis Tielens
Travis has worked on commercial boats in Oceanside Harbor since he was 11 years old and has watched firsthand as fishers sell off their catch to corporate interests that export it around the globe. “I mean as far as making fresh seafood readily available to the people that live near the ocean, it’s just a no-brainer. Why is our product being exported to different countries when those resources should be directed to the surrounding community and nourishing the community? You’re hard pressed to find fresh seafood like that being next to the ocean, and it just doesn’t make sense. There’s too much bureaucracy, too much corporate meddling in our resources, and we want to pull it away from the lengthy corporate processes and give the power back to the people.”
Before Oceanside launched on April 28, the only fishermen-direct markets in the area were the San Diego Tuna Harbor Dockside Market and the Dory Fleet Market in Newport Beach. “We felt like we needed something in between Newport and downtown San Diego,” says Chris Hart, who manages one of the first stands at the market featuring still-swimming California sheephead and live rock crab. Chris deckhands for a few of the commercial vessels in the port that catch everything from flying fish to spiny lobster.
The Faces Behind the Fish
It’s an amazing privilege to be able to buy seafood straight from the fisher who caught it. You can chat with them about their preferred cooking techniques as well as their fishing methods. Marcos Castro of the F/V Seawolf in Oceanside Harbor takes the time to process every single rockfish he catches through the Japanese ikejime and shinkei jime techniques. “The fish is dispatched right away with a spike in the brain, and then we slip a wire down the spine right away. It releases the nerves and relaxes the muscles in the fish. All the chefs I sell to prefer this. It’s a better quality meat for sushi and it has a longer shelf life. We actually take the time, with a smaller operation, and do this with every fish. “
To be able to put a face and a name behind the fish on your plate creates the kind of community-driven foodways that we are all striving to embody. There’s no middle man and zero food miles, you know exactly the source of your meal. “It’s unusual to be able to connect with fishermen off the water like that”, says Tanner Saraspe founder of Saraspe Seafoods and co-founder of Local Fish. “Fishermen are usually fishing, and to be able to connect with them portside is something really special.”
A Small and Impactful Fishing Fleet
It’s a small community of fishermen in Oceanside with a fleet of only 12 active commercial vessels. This is compared to 359 registered vessels in the San Diego Port. Travis assures me that it is “very small but very productive.” He says, “This port lands about 350,000 pounds of seafood per year, which is pretty productive for a small fishing vessel fleet.” For context, the San Diego fleet landed 5,088,146 pounds of seafood in 2019.
Emily Miller, the project director for Fishful Future, has the first stand at the market where she can welcome shoppers and offer guidance if necessary; there’s also free posters if you purchase fish. Fishful Future is a consumer education initiative for San Diego Seafood in partnership with California Sea Grant.
I don't feel you can replace the social and emotional value of eating from your local ecosystem, and the way that it ties people directly to the place where they live and the people that catch the seafood is a pathway to greater connection to the ocean and stewardship for the ocean.
– Emily Miller, the project director for Fishful Future
“I’m so proud of the community for this grassroots effort, which is fishermen driven. It is simply amazing in the sense that it benefits so many different parties — not just the fishermen who get access to a better price point by going direct to the consumer, but also a community that has been divorced from our coastal ecosystem in terms of diet for quite some time. There's still a lot of work to do around raising awareness for the species that our local fishermen and women bring in, but this is where it starts,” she says. “I don't feel you can replace the social and emotional value of eating from your local ecosystem, and the way that it ties people directly to the place where they live and the people that catch the seafood is a pathway to greater connection to the ocean and stewardship for the ocean. And it improves quality of life and fosters joy. I don't think we have enough joy in our food system so it's great to see people working towards that here.”
Good Food and Community
I took home a beautiful whole vermillion rockfish, which I cooked whole and then used the scraps and bones to make a lovely seafood soup. Also, I couldn't resist the live California sheephead, which I had processed before turning into a zingy ceviche enjoyed by all in our backyard. There’s definitely something about looking your food in the eyes that begs you to not waste one single piece of it.
The greatest thing I left with however was a strong sense of community and this gut feeling that connecting with people over food in real life is and has been a natural part of the human experience for centuries — one that only recently has been lost on us somewhere between convenience and a so-called loneliness epidemic. Getting out and connecting with people filled a deep void I wasn’t even aware I had before I started to fill it back up.
Fishermen’s Market of North County is open Sundays at Oceanside Harbor from 8 am to 2 pm or when sold out.
