“My wife told me to sell the boats,” says Brad Pettinger, a longtime trawl fisherman in the Pacific Northwest. “But I said, honey, who’s gonna buy them? At that time we just didn’t have anything.”The “anything” was fish to catch. Fifteen years ago, America’s vast $50 million Pacific groundfish fishery, which stretches some 1,200 miles from Southern California to the Canadian border, collapsed. Several critical species — from the spiky, orange canary rockfish to the large lingcod — had dropped to below one-quarter of their natural, un-fished levels. 

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