The tuna clippers — when San Diego fed the world from bamboo poles.

By the summer of 1935, San Diego was the tuna capital of the world, and the evidence was inescapable from any height above the harbor: tuna clippers packed the inner anchorage three and four deep, their booms rigged out for unloading, their live-bait tanks already cycling seawater for the next voyage. More than two hundred fifty of these vessels operated out of Point Loma — a fleet that had grown in two decades from a handful of converted salmon boats to the largest single-species fishing operation in American history. They were not handsome ships. They were wide and deep and a little awkward in a swell, built not for grace but for capacity: capacity to carry ice, capacity to carry live bait, capacity to stay at sea for two months if the grounds required it. They were built for the bluefin and the yellowfin, and for the families — Portuguese, Italian, Croatian — who would eat or starve on what they brought home.

The technology that made the tuna clipper possible was unglamorous but brilliant: the live-bait tank. Running nearly the length of the keel and plumbed with continuous seawater pumps that never stopped, the tank kept thousands of northern anchovies alive and active through weeks at sea. Dead bait sank; it did not attract a frenzy. Live bait, hurled overboard in scoops and bucketfuls, turned a school of tuna into a churning, competitive mass — fish striking at anything that moved, including a barbless hook draped with a strip of feather. The bait boat, as the design was generically known along the Pacific coast, was San Diego's own industrial innovation, refined by the city's Azorean fishing community through thirty years of trial and loss. The tank specifications — pump ratios, stocking densities, species mix — were not written down. They were remembered.

When the school was found — sometimes stretching for miles, visible as a darkening of the surface from the crow's nest — the captain would bring his vessel upwind and the chumming began. Men at the stern threw anchovies in a continuous cascade, holding the tuna in a feeding frenzy, while the deck crew took their stations along the rail with their poles. The poles were Tonkin bamboo, seven to twelve feet long, rigged with an eighteen-inch line, a barbless hook, and a feather lure — the whole rig designed to bring a fish over the rail in one uninterrupted motion: dip, strike, heave, release. There was no reel, no brake, no mechanical advantage. The fish flew through the air and landed on the deck, and the man was already bending for the next one. Pole-and-line fishing in this form was ancient; what San Diego's fleet did with it — at industrial scale, by crews of twenty men over voyages of sixty days or more — was something new in the history of American seafood.

Status on the deck was calibrated in poles. A small albacore — twelve or fifteen pounds — was a one-pole fish, catchable by any able-bodied deckhand. A fat yellowfin at sixty or seventy pounds was a two-pole fish, requiring two men with synchronized poles to swing it aboard in a single arc. A full-grown Pacific bluefin, running to a hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds, was a three-pole fish — and the men who could handle them were the aristocracy of the fleet. Three-pole men were known by name in every cannery office and chandlery on the waterfront. They were almost uniformly from Pico, from Faial, from São Jorge — men who had grown up hauling line in the North Atlantic and arrived in California with a physical grammar for the sea that no training program could replicate. On a hot afternoon off the coast of Mexico, a crew of three-pole men could put forty tons of bluefin on the deck before dark. The company man who met the vessel at the dock already knew their names before the lines were made fast.

That fish had to go somewhere, and the answer was the mile-long strip of canneries along what is now Harbor Drive — a district so saturated with the smell of cooked fish that residents simply stopped noticing it. Van Camp Sea Food, which had pioneered commercial tuna canning in San Diego in 1914, operated the largest plant; Westgate Sea Products, Sun Harbor, and half a dozen smaller operations lined up beside it. The canneries ran twenty-four hours a day at peak season, employing thousands of women — predominantly Mexican and Filipino — who worked the butchering and packing lines at a pace the fishermen themselves found humbling. The housewife in Dayton who opened a can on a Friday evening was eating a fish that had been alive in the equatorial Pacific three weeks before. She had no way of knowing, and the industry had no particular interest in telling her.

To sustain this scale of production, the fleet ranged farther each decade. Early voyages had chased albacore in the near Pacific, a hundred or two hundred miles offshore. By the mid-1930s, the clippers were routinely working grounds four thousand miles from San Diego: the coast of Panama, the upwellings off Ecuador, the cold reach of the Humboldt Current off Peru where yellowfin schooled in concentrations that seemed inexhaustible. Some vessels pressed as far as the Galápagos Islands, a name familiar to every San Diego fisherman long before it meant anything to anyone else. The American Tunaboat Association, headquartered in San Diego, negotiated fishing rights with the governments of Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and Panama — a quiet private diplomacy that prefigured, by decades, the international fisheries agreements that would eventually reorder the entire Pacific.

The community that crewed and sustained this fleet gathered on the bluffs and flats west of downtown, in neighborhoods understood by every resident without formal designation. Portuguese Hill rose above the kelp beds; the Italian flats spread closer to the working docks. Family names from the Azores — Freitas, Medina, Avila, Bettencourt, Rosa — appeared on vessels, on cannery invoices, on the rolls of the mutual aid societies that functioned as banks, insurance companies, and social anchors for immigrant families. Sicilian names — Ghio, Alioto, Campagna — appeared alongside them on the waterfront. The two communities worshipped separately and socialized carefully, but they fished together, organized together, and understood together what the sea required. A novena at Sacred Heart before a voyage. A thanksgiving mass when the fleet came home heavy. The boat's name painted on the transom in neat block letters — a wife's name, a saint's name, a daughter born while the captain was at sea.

The canneries are gone now. The last packing shed along Harbor Drive closed in the 1980s, and the site where thousands of women once worked double shifts now anchors the convention circuit — the Convention Center's glass sails rising where the fish smell never quite left the timber. The clipper fleet itself unwound slowly: first displaced in the 1950s by purse seiners that could encircle an entire school without a single pole, then devastated in the 1970s by the tuna-dolphin controversy that recast the industry's image and drained its American market almost overnight. The three-pole men retired, and with them went a body of knowledge — the weight of a bluefin in the first flex of bamboo, the sound a school makes working a bait cloud from two hundred yards — that had never been written down because it had never needed to be. You learned it from the man beside you on the rail. He learned it from his father. The same bight off Point Loma. The same August swells lifting the kelp off the point. You could go out into it tonight.