by LEAH GREENSTEIN
When John Wilson started crab and lobster fishing nearly 30 years ago, he thought his biggest adversary was going to be Mother Nature. While she does put up her share of fights—currents that pull the orange buoys he uses to mark his traps underwater, 25-foot swells, 30-knot winds and crashing waves—the hardest part may be battling how little people value his work these days.

According to John, a tall, 40-ish man with the tousled, slightly graying sun-bleached hair of a surfer, sea smoke eyes and the get-it-while-you-can philosophy of someone who works at the whims of nature, there are only 67 active rock crab fisherman left in California and fewer than 80 lobster fisherman.

“We get swallowed up by the system that’s trying to put us all out,” John told me one afternoon whilst out on his boat, the Sea Fever. “There really are not any major, big fisherman anymore in this state; there used to be, but like I said, the regulations have become so strict and severe and the cost of fuel and doing business in this state so expensive, it has made it unsustainable.”

Then there’s harbor drama. On the day I went out with John he got a phone call from the harbormaster telling him that he needed to move his slip that night. The Sea Fever, a 45-foot workboat with no bathroom, just a bucket in the cabin down below, has the yellow-slicker feel of old New England. It doesn’t quite blend in with the rows of shiny white yachts and sportfishing boats at the harbor, and his neighbors were complaining that the boat occasionally smelled like bait. The move to the new slip at the outer reaches of the harbor, nearly a mile away from his current one near the parking lot, would add at least another hour onto his already arduous 12–15 hour work day.

John was born in Studio City. He fell in love with fishing when he was 5 and spent much of his teen years hopping the RTD bus west to fish off the Santa Monica Pier. He moved to Santa Barbara to get a degree in environmental studies from UCSB, where he got into commercial fishing when permits were easy to get and cheap. “I met this lobster fisherman who asked me if I wanted to come out and be his crew member,” he recalls. “But I was going to school so I asked him if I could do it part time. Once I saw how well he was doing, how much money he was making, I said, ‘I could do that.’”

It’s hard-earned money, however. John takes the Sea Fever down a lonely line that stretches from the Santa Barbara Harbor to Point Conception. With his golden retriever Roxy and a single deckhand named Paul, he pushes through the long days, hauling 150-pound vinyl-coated traps teeming with yellow and red rock crab out of the water. He has about 100 traps to check, and from each trap he gets about two 5-gallon buckets of salable crab after he tosses the pregnant females, molting crabs and small ones back into the sea. In the winter, he often spends the night out on the boat, mooring amid the 25-foot swells and violent weather of the Channel Islands near Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa islands, where he goes to catch spiny lobster. When he’s not out pulling the crab or lobster traps, John goes out to fish for red snapper, halibut and small, sweet ridgeback shrimp.

“I feel like the general public does not understand what we have out here. They have no idea that just over those mountains there’s crab and lobster and fish,” he told me. Fortunately, they’re learning. His crab were an immediate hit at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, which makes waking up at 3 a.m. to get to LA from his home in Santa Ynez a little easier. The $4 a pound he can get for the crab, and the ability to connect with consumers and rebuild excitement for our local bounty, makes the trek worthwhile.

Before he started selling at the farmers’ markets (he also works Solvang and Carpenteria) most of his catch went to a distributor who sold it to large Asian markets in LA, paying just $1.28 a pound. Prices for the spiny lobster weren’t much better. However, John is feeling optimistic.

“Nobody’s seen lobster down there,” he said, “I know it. I know they’re going to love them.”

You can buy yellow and red rock crab (year-round), spiny lobsters, ridgeback shrimp (October–May) and line-caught halibut and red snapper from John Wilson, occasionally helped out by his mom or his wife, Tina, on Sundays at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market. Roxy the golden retriever stays home to sleep. It’s her only day off.

LEAH GREENSTEIN is a Los Angeles- based food and wine writer, the author of the blog SpicySaltySweet.com and the co-author of the Food Blog Code of Ethics.