Squid Coming In

Just on a lark my daughter and I took a little stroll along the waterfront here in Ventura Harbor.

The water had a white crust of seagulls floating on it, telling us something was up.

The Ocean Angel III, a massive stainless steel fishing trawler, lay at the end of the fish dock, canted over on her port side. Seagulls wheeled and mewed and gabbled at one another.

We walked closer, because here at Ventura Harbor the waterfront walkway brings you into the very heart of the fish-offloading operation.

A vacuum pump roared at the edge of the dock, and conveyor belts thundered on the fishery side of the walkway.

Squid, tiny market squid no longer than your hand, cascaded from the end of the vacuum hose onto the quickly moving conveyor belts. Squid by the thousands, pale, fleshy colored guys with big black eyes. Every now and again one would slip off the conveyor belt to be seized by a greedy gull.

Next to the conveyor were massive four foot orange cube-shaped plastic containers filled to the brim with iced squid. Forklifts hurried back and forth across the docks, moving filled containers to market trucks and bringing more ice for those waiting to be filled.

The whole operation took only about an hour. Ocean Angel III disgorged the contents of her massive fish hold and then headed over to the anchorage to replenish for her next voyage. She hurried away from the dock, of course, to make room for another boat coming in.

Now, I’m just guessing that Ocean Angel III’s hold is about 36 feet long by 15 wide by 9 feet deep – those numbers are absolute guesses, by the way. Those numbers yield 4,860 cubic feet of squid. Imagine she’s just one of 20 or so boats that operate of Ventura Harbor, and imagine Ventura is one of ten ports operating on the Pacific coast at any one given day. That works out to nearly a million cubic feet of squid coming out of the sea.

It begs the question: just how many squid are out there?