The Perilous Existence of an Independent Fishing Operation in Newport, Oregon: an Interview with Cari Brandberg

By Brian Bahouth

Cari Brandberg is co-owner of Chelsea Rose Seafood in Newport, Oregon. She is also an adoptive parent, a foster parent, a fishing safety advocate, secretary of the Newport Fishermen’s Wives, and a second-generation Newport fishing industry worker. Brandberg was a recent invitee to a roundtable with Sen. Ron Wyden and shared a variety of pressing concerns with the lawmaker and his staff. Her candid description of the life of an independent fishing operation and its workers revealed an existence fraught with physical and economic peril.

Cari and her husband, Cody, operate a 42-foot fishing vessel and a 20-foot dory that deploy out of Newport and fish in waters up and down the coast. According to Brandberg, they primarily use the hook-and-line method to catch fish like tuna and salmon. They also operate in pot fisheries where they harvest crab.

The Chelsea Rose resembles a fishing boat but is a barge, a floating seafood store moored at Port Dock 3 in Newport. Much of the fish landed in Oregon is exported, but Brandberg said her family has a commitment to providing local seafood for coastal residents and others nearby. Customers come from as far away as Idaho and Washington to buy whole fish, which the Chelsea Rose sources not only from their fishing activities but from other Newport vessels, or “families” as she refers to them. 

Shopping at the Chelsea Rose is not like a trip to a grocer’s fish counter. 

“We’re really unique in the way that we’re a little like if you go down to a regular fishing vessel and they’re selling their catch for the day, what they caught, they can sell off the dock,” Brandberg said in the KYAQ studios recently. “We both started out that way, me and my husband, with our family selling off the dock, selling our dad’s catch. 

“And then Cody started the Chelsea Rose as a dream of having a fish market that sold just like a boat off the dock. So you get to come down and see your whole fish and pick it out, and we filet it for you right there. 

“And then you go home with fresh meat, and it’s more meat than maybe you typically get when you’re at a counter and you just get a pound of meat. So it’s your fish for the year. It’s kind of like buying a part of a cow or something like that.

“But we do have people that come down all the time because a little rockfish is perfect for dinner, right?”

Roughly 6 years ago, Brandberg and her husband opened a processing facility in the Port of Toledo, which helps provide frozen, vacuum-packed product to local restaurants. Even if it’s a little less convenient than buying from a corporate food wholesaler, some local restaurants are intent on sourcing their fish locally. Brandberg said she’s grateful for that support, but the challenges are many for small independent fishing operations.

“It’s really hard to stay in fishing anymore. Fishing has become a difficult career path for some young people, and some people would say we have a graying of the fleet like they talk about a lot with farming or other agricultural work. It’s hard work. But it can come with big benefits. 

“But for our town, we have seen a real deterioration of infrastructure. So starting at our harbor, our Port of Newport struggles to keep up with the maintenance that is needed, and the cost of maintenance and upkeep and replacement of some of our infrastructure that wasn’t well cared for in the past, and it’s catching up. 

“Pilings are breaking, electrical issues, things like that. We need to do a restructuring of Port Dock 7, so that is going to be millions of dollars, and work with the Army Corps of Engineers, and I sit on the Port User Group board to try to help with input, as well as a fisherman and a dock sale person and also a leaseholder of the port. The Chelsea Rose is a leaseholder so different than a normal moorage holder, and so we have quite the interest there, and we work hard to advocate, to help whatever we can, help the Port get the funding that they need.”

In 2022, the Port of Newport disposed of 14 abandoned vessels at a cost of roughly $86,000. Today, the port has 16 more to deal with. The problem is chronic in ports up and down the coast, and as Brandberg points out, abandoned vessels take up dock space where working vessels could be mooring, and, a lack of dock space inhibits the growth of small fishing companies. 

As important as secure moorage is having a place to sell your fish. Without a place to sell their catch, fishing companies stay tied to the pier. That the number of seafood processors in Newport has dwindled in recent years is a big problem for the local fishing industry.

“Our infrastructure, of our processors just went down over the years,” Brandberg laments. “There used to be many on our harbor, and you can see some of the deteriorating old buildings where there were fish plants. 

“And over the last decade, we’ve lost two. We’ve lost the majority of Hallmark. They’re barely functioning here in Newport anymore. And then I think most of us have heard about losing Bornstein’s. So whether they still hold those leases in our town or not, they’re not at full functioning capacity, and they’re not necessarily taking in  vessels. So that’s a big hit. 

“We still have Pacific Seafood. Before that, we lost Trident. Pacific Seafood took over the Trident plant, which decreased some of the capacity, some may say. Not every vessel has a market with Pacific Seafood, or could even get a market with Pacific Seafood. 

“So you get into a place where ‘You shouldn’t go fishing without a market” is the old-school way of being. You don’t go fishing unless you know where you’re selling your fish, because that would be wasteful, and most fishermen do that and know that and live by those rules. So they need to have a place to sell. 

“And like I said, the Chelsea Rose is one. And there’s some other small, independent people like us. There’s Living Pacific Seafood I used to work with and some other small ones like that that do market-specific species. Maybe they only do blast tuna, or maybe they only do live crab or cooked crab or different species with different forms of landing. 

“But those processors that took whatever you were going to catch, and you could go talk to them and say, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about going salmon fishing. Can I sell to you? What’s the going price?’—a lot of that is gone when you just have one processor in town.”

Furthermore, the regulatory environment for managing ocean fisheries is complex. Each species has a different way they can be landed. Fisheries are segmented. There are quotas. It’s easy for a fishing operation to lose access to a species and subsequent market. One large fishing vessel staying tied to the pier reverberates into the community.

“A large boat might represent four or five workers on that boat, between the captain and the crew. That’s four or five families, at least, and maybe the owner’s family as well. So that may be six local families that lost a market per boat. 

“So when Bornstein’s left, those boats have to deliver in Astoria. Now there was already boats unloading in Astoria.  So how many boats can unload at the one place? So I’m sure that you would find that there are boats that lost a market due to it, and also just those processors struggling to keep up with the boats that have this long-standing relationship with them and they want to buy their catch. 

“And so those are local families that are now distanced from their family members. Those men or women are not coming home every day. They’re fishing in Astoria, they’re fishing in Westport, they’re fishing in Brookings. They’re fishing wherever they can unload, even though that boat is really harbored here and their family is here, and so that’s a big hit to our community.”

Brandberg is hopeful that locals buying local fish will help establish and sustain markets and keep Newport boats at sea, but more essential change is necessary.

“That doesn’t really change the fact that we have this crumbling infrastructure that costs billions of dollars to be able to rebuild, and we don’t really have the funding, and we can’t expect it all to go on the back of Pacific Seafood either. 

“I’m not speaking for Pacific Seafood, but I’m just saying that it’s gonna be a lot. They don’t process here in Newport really anymore. So everything’s getting trucked out. Why is that happening like that? Is it labor? Is it … Looking into our community, where can we support [the fishing industry], because it comes down to hundreds, if not a thousand local fishermen and fishing families that are affected by these type of changes.” 

Brandberg has an abiding commitment to fisherman safety. She said her collaboration with Oregon Sea Grant and Oregon State University enabled her to help develop and distribute a life jacket tailored for working on a fishing vessel—a now popular safety device that removes the stigma of wearing a life jacket. 

“Sea Grant has done a lot of work that I’ve worked together with them [on] through my  volunteer work with Newport Fishermen’s Wives. I’m the treasurer for Newport Fisherman’s Wives, a local nonprofit that most people know, and we were able to work together with Sea Grant through, first, innovation of developing a life jacket that fishermen would want to wear. 

“Working together with Kent, a local manufacturer in Washington, and Englund Marine Supply, a local marine supply company, they were able to adapt and create a life jacket that fishermen, with fisherman’s input, that fishermen like to wear. It was a long project done by OSU Health in cooperation with Sea Grant and Kent.

“And so they came to us at Newport Fisherman’s Wives and said, We want to give these out at a reduced price. We want fishermen to start wearing life jackets. We think it’ll save their life. It’ll protect their body because these life jackets actually have padding to protect you when you’re lifting gear and bump the rails and things like that. 

“And so we got together this small group of women, and we were like, How do we offer these right before crab season? Let’s get this going. We’ll fund it, whatever we have to do. 

“And we were able to offer them at just a $25 suggested donation, and a lot of fishermen didn’t have the $25 before the crab season. Fishermen are focusing on their families more than they’re focusing on themselves. They don’t know when they’re going to get crabbing. They’ve been possibly three months, a lot of them with no work at that time, waiting on the crab season, working for free every day, but no pay. 

“And so we were so happy. It felt so good to be able to give these guys these life jackets, and we now are seeing them save lives. We’ve seen them in recent tragedies. The fishermen that had life jackets on or had a life jacket with them, they were provided through our program. 

“So we know we’ve also seen loss. So we know that there is a need still for more. And at this point, over three years of this project, we’ve given out over 475 life jackets.”

Oregon Sea Grant is one of 34 Sea Grant programs nationwide. Of the 34, three have not received their base funding for fiscal year 2025 yet, and Oregon has the unfortunate distinction of being one of those. The program has received 59 percent of its annual funding to date, which means they are $1.2 million short for this year. The federal fiscal year ends on September 30, and according to Oregon Sea Grant director Karina Nielsen, 35 to 50 jobs hang in the balance.

Seeking and applying for grants will help fund more life jacket purchases in the future. Brandberg said the small group of fishermen’s wives had no grant writing experience, and Sea Grant and OSU played a critical role.

“With the help of OSU Sea Grant and OSU Health, they have helped us write these grants. We’re not grant writers. I’m not a grant writer. I’m working together with them to get them the numbers, but they’re writing the grant to help me, and it’s been huge.

“Amelia from OSU Health came and she’s joined our group now, and she’s helping us do so much, and we’re just a small group. So we need that kind of help that those kind of departments have given us, and a lot of the help is administrative. It’s not like they gave us the life jacket and we gave the life jacket out. It was like, you give a man a fish, or you teach him to fish, so they’re teaching us to fund ourselves to be able to do these huge projects.”

Countless and frequently unexpected factors can derail a small, independent fishing operation. Along with that unpredictability, comes inconsistent paychecks and the need for the gamut of scarce social services.

“I think a lot of time when we think of Medicare, and we think of food stamps, and we think of food banks, and we think of help, low-income housing, or low-cost housing, you might say, we don’t think of working families. And the reality is, there’s a lot of working families in the fishing industry who need help with HUD or occasionally may need a food bank. Or in a slow season when they haven’t, like I said, they’ve been going to work every day but they haven’t gotten paid in two months. Their family also needs to eat. 

“But you may look and go, ‘Well, they’re driving a decent vehicle.  They’re making it. He seems like he has a good job. The dad works.’ That doesn’t mean that they have enough to get by, and it can be a struggle, 

“So we’ve got to think about those things. I like to advocate for those things in my community, is that local fishermen are in need of some of these resources as well, and they’re working families.

“And at times of the year and times of their life, they maybe work family-wage jobs, they may have great jobs and not need any of those resources. But then there’s going to be times that they might and we don’t always know. It’s a seasonability that you said, you know, if there’s a domoic acid outbreak, no one knows that’s going to, and the crab season is going to get delayed by two months, or by a month. 

“What are those families going to do? What would your family do if you had no money coming in? You’ve already done two months of crab work, or maybe a month of crab work, with no income, and then now you’ve gotta wait two months for crab season, and Christmas is coming. It’s cold out. You got to turn the heat on in your house. You’re driving your kids everywhere still. You’re doing all the things. What would you do? 

“And so these families are in that situation and our community. We know we have a shortage of all those resources. We have a shortage of food bank resources. We have a shortage of food stamps, and sometimes these people may not be able to get food stamps because they made money three months ago. That doesn’t change the fact that your pantry is empty today.”