Silver Harvest

In the formative days of the Monterey fishing industry, working boats were too small to carry both a crew and a catch, so fishermen towed a second boat called a lighter that could hold 25 to 60 tons of sardines. Because the canning plants along Cannery Row did not have loading docks, the catch was off-loaded at sea. Fishermen used brailing nets to transfer fish from the lighters to metal buckets that held about 600 pounds of fish each, and the buckets were winched by wire cables to the cannery weight room just offshore, where fishermen were paid by the weight of their catch. Conveyor belts moved the catch from pump houses to the canneries for processing. This bucket-and-cable transfer was long and arduous work for fishermen who had already spent the night bringing in the catch.

Monterey, California · United States