Denny Lopes Is Catching Fish He Can't Sell

Futures is speculative fiction. Denny Lopes does not exist, though by the time you finish reading this, you may find that hard to believe. The ocean he describes is extrapolated from conditions documented through early 2026.¹

It's 4:40 AM at Monterey's Wharf No. 2, and Denny Lopes is shoveling ice into a hold that used to be his father's.

The Maria Terceira — named for an island in the Azores where Lopes's grandfather was born — is a 38-foot troller that has fished these waters under three generations of the same family, for three different species. Sardines, then salmon, now whatever swims into the net. The deck tells the story better than Denny does, at least at first. Troll masts rigged with flasher-herring setups stand alongside a rack of yo-yo jigs and heavy surface iron that belong on a sportfishing boat out of San Diego. A milk crate near the stern holds coils of 50-pound test and 2/0 J-hooks. None of it matches. It looks like two different boats had a disagreement.

Lopes bought the Maria Terceira at a harbor auction in 2025, after his father missed six months of slip payments during what turned out to be the third consecutive salmon closure.² He paid $31,000 for a boat his father bought for $140,000 in 2003. He has spent three years since trying to make it work in an ocean that no longer resembles the one any of those prices were set for.

He stops shoveling long enough to talk.

You're loading a lot of ice for April.

Denny: Yellowtail bleed hot. You pull a salmon out of 52-degree water, it holds. You pull a yellowtail out of 66-degree water in April and you've got maybe twenty minutes before the flesh goes soft. So I'm burning through twice the ice for fish that pay me less. I'm not going to tell you the ice bill. It's embarrassing.

What are you going out for today?

Denny: Honestly? I'm going out to see what's there. Which — that's not how this works. You don't just go see what's there. You target a species. You have gear for it, a permit for it, a buyer expecting it. That's a fishery. What I'm doing is more like grocery shopping blindfolded.

What's been showing up?

Denny: Yellowtail. Lots of yellowtail. Some dorado, which — my grandfather would not have believed you. Mahi-mahi off Monterey. I pulled a wahoo last September. A wahoo. I didn't even know what it was. Had to text a picture to a guy I know in Cabo. He sent back a laughing emoji and then called me to make sure I wasn't joking.

The salmon gear catches some of it by accident. The troll rig will hook a yellowtail if it's aggressive enough, but it's the wrong setup — wrong jig weight, wrong action, wrong line test. Half the time the fish breaks off or the leader snaps. So I've been rigging this stuff [gestures at the jig rack] that I bought off a retired charter captain in Dana Point. I'm teaching myself to fish for species I've never targeted, with gear I bought used, on a boat that was designed for something else entirely.

Can you sell what you're catching?

Denny: [long pause]

That's the question, isn't it. I can catch yellowtail. Fine. But my buyer at Moss Landing — guy who's taken my fish for nine years — he doesn't want yellowtail. Doesn't have the cold chain for it, doesn't have restaurant accounts asking for it, doesn't know how to move it. He wants rockfish. He wants squid when it's running. He wants salmon, which — [laughs] — yeah. Me too, buddy.

So last month I drove an ice chest of yellowtail down to a buyer in San Pedro. Three and a half hours each way. Got twelve bucks a pound, which is good. But after fuel, ice, and seven hours of my life on the 101, I netted about what I'd make selling rockfish off the boat. And the rockfish I can catch with my existing permits, my existing gear, without driving to Los Angeles.

What about the permits? Could you get licensed for these species commercially?

Denny: For yellowtail in volume, you want a gill net permit. California's been restricting gill nets for years — bycatch, marine mammals.³ That door's mostly closed. I could theoretically sell what I hook-and-line under my existing permits, but the trip limits and the lack of any management plan for yellowtail mean there's no structure. No quota I'm fishing against, no season I'm fishing in. The fish exist in a regulatory blank spot. They're here, they're real, I can touch them, but on paper they're still a Southern California species.⁴

The regulators aren't stupid. They know the fish moved. But the paperwork hasn't.

Your father fished salmon. Your grandfather fished sardines.

Denny: And the sardines collapsed.⁵ And the salmon collapsed. People say, oh, it's cyclical, it comes back. The sardines came back, sort of, for a while. But my grandfather didn't wait around for them. He switched to salmon. My dad didn't wait around for the salmon either. He just ran out of time. Sold the boat. I bought it back, which my mother considers either loyalty or stupidity, and most days I think she's right about the second one.

What does a day look like when the math doesn't work?

Denny: You go out at five. You burn forty, fifty gallons of diesel. You catch fish you can't sell, or fish you can sell for less than it cost to catch them. You come back, hose down the deck, try to move whatever you've got to whoever will take it. Some days I'm selling direct off the boat to tourists on the wharf. Which, fine, but that's not a business. That's a guy with a cooler.

The birds are the thing that gets me, actually. You used to see pelicans working the bait balls, cormorants diving, the whole show. Now the pelicans sit on the rocks looking thin. Skinny birds.⁶ The krill's wrong, the anchovies are wrong, everything underneath is wrong, and the fish I'm catching are the ones that followed the warm water in. They're eating whatever's left. And the things that were here before are just... not.

I try not to think about it too hard. But you're out there alone at six in the morning and the water's flat and there's nothing diving and nothing jumping and you think, okay. Something happened here.

Do you think about leaving? Fishing somewhere else, or doing something else?

What would your grandfather say about mahi-mahi off Monterey?

Denny: He'd say, "Quanto é que pagam?"

How much do they pay?

He was from the Azores. Practical people. He wouldn't care what the fish is called. He'd want to know if he could sell it.

And I'd have to tell him: not here. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

He picks up the shovel again. The compressor hums. Past the breakwater, the ocean is the temperature of a swimming pool and nobody's swimming.

Footnotes

1. Marine heatwave conditions (NEP25A) and species range shifts documented through March 2026 by NOAA Fisheries. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/west-coast-waters-experiencing-another-large-marine-heatwave ↩

2. California's commercial salmon fishery was closed for three consecutive years (2023–2025), the longest closure on record. A limited reopening with trip limits began in 2026. https://calmatters.org/environment/2026/04/california-salmon-season-reopen-closure/ ↩

3. California has progressively restricted drift gill net use due to marine mammal bycatch. Humpback whale entanglements in crab gear increased as whales moved inshore following shifting prey. https://www.pbs.org/video/salmon-ban-and-crab-fishing-restrictions-hit-coastal-fishers-hard-cf02n8/ ↩

4. California DFW classifies yellowtail as most common south of Point Conception (~140 miles south of Monterey). No fishery management plan exists for the species. https://marinespecies.wildlife.ca.gov/yellowtail/true/ ↩

5. Pacific sardine populations collapsed during the 2014–2016 marine heatwave ("The Blob"), triggering a multi-year federal fishery disaster. The directed commercial fishery remains closed for 2025–2026. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/looking-back-blob-record-warming-drives-unprecedented-ocean-change ↩

6. Seabird starvation events across central and southern California were documented in early 2026, attributed to marine heatwave disruption of the food web. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/22/weather/california-marine-heat-wave-climate ↩