Silver Harvest
Historic Cannery Row
In the formative days of the Monterey fishing industry, the working boats were too small to carry both a crew and a catch. The fishermen towed a second boat called a “lighter,” which could hold 25 to 60 tons of sardines.
Since the canning plants along Cannery Row didn’t have loading docks, the catch was off-loaded at sea. Fishermen used brailing nets to transfer fish from the lighters to metal buckets, which held about 600 pounds of fish each.
The buckets were winched by wire cables to the cannery weight room just offshore, and fishermen were paid by the weight of their catch. Conveyor belts moved the catch from pump houses to the canneries for processing. Transferring fish by the bucket-and-cable method was a long and arduous task for the fishermen, who had already worked all night bringing in the catch.
Marker can be reached from Cannery Row.
Courtesy hmdb.org
