Gary Griggs, Our Ocean Backyard | Market squid is still No. 1

The squid remains California’s top seafood story in Monterey Bay’s long fishing history, according to Gary Griggs’ “Our Ocean Backyard” column. He traces how indigenous Rumsen, Ohlone and Esselen communities harvested coastal resources before Chinese immigrant fishing villages formed along the Monterey Peninsula in the early 1850s, later joined by Japanese deep-water abalone divers and Sicilian purse-seine techniques. Mechanized canning helped spark a Pacific sardine boom in the early 1910s, earning Monterey the “Sardine Capital of the World.” But a sardine collapse in the late 1940s to early 1950s shifted the economy toward tourism, research, and regulated fisheries such as squid and rockfish.