Mail Buoy

In memory of a Highliner

s the story was told, Victor A McHenry, an airline pilot at Pan Am Airways, had a boat that had sunk on its mooring in California’s Pillar Point Harbor. He told his son Mike one day: “You can have that boat if you want to refloat it.”

That was enough for Mike to hear. He began his fishing career at the age of 15, fishing in the summers until he graduated from Half Moon Bay High School in 1961. After that, he went full-time on the water. Prior to all this, he was a daily fixture on Romeo’s pier with a fishing pole.

“Mike was a great kid, always fishing from the pier and helping us unload or whatever. Then later, he had the little GG. He’d go down to Three Rocks every day and come in with that boat loaded with ling cod,” said John Koepf, several years senior and a retired abalone diver.

In 1965, Mike bought the F/V Pescadero and continued his career, now as a salmon fisherman. When his abilities outgrew that boat, he built the Merva W and launched her in 1971, the legendary “blue boat.” She was a steel 63-foot salmon, crab and albacore fishing boat. He made a name for himself throughout coastal California and Oregon as a fun-loving Irishman and a salmon fisherman extraordinaire. Fishermen were drawn to him as a natural leader, and he developed a following nicknamed the Z Squad.

In the early ’80s he pioneered the squid fishery in Half Moon Bay, and he was the first fisherman to send

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Send letters to jhathaway@ divcom.com. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and style. truckloads of squid to market from the bay. The iconic blue boat was by then synonymous with the harbor at Pillar Point, and even those who never met Mike felt his presence in the community.

Mike was called upon to refloat a boat once again in 1985 when he sunk the Merva W with too many squid.

“Squid ink you. Then sometimes, squid sink you,” said Mike at the time.

However, this was not to be the end of the boat that Mike had built and named after his mother. He refloated her and towed her back to the harbor, where he began to tirelessly rebuild the Merva W over the next nine months. Then, the iconic blue boat was born again and continued to deliver millions of pounds of seafood until Mike decided to retire in 2015. Mike was ready to hand off the boat to his son Porter, but not before sponsoning the boat with air chambers. He was not about to chance another sinking of the blue boat at the hand of his son. The Merva W left the shipyard in Richmond, born yet again by Mike’s hands, and better than ever. He retired with his wife and partner, Kim, to their Old Crow Farms in Maxwell, Calif.

This August, Mike D. McHenry lost a long battle with prostate cancer.

Throughout Mike’s long career, he recognized that it was not enough to just catch fish, it was necessary to lobby for fishermen and to steward the resource. He spoke in front of the California Fish and Game Commission on numerous occasions, and you could hardly find one game warden or official who did not know his name. For his activism and dedication to a lifetime of fishery issues, he was named a National Fisherman Highliner in 1995 and the Highliner of the Year in 2012 by the Pacific States Marine Commission.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was his contribution to the salmon resource. Mike brought the idea of creating the Salmon Stamp to the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations at their directors meeting in Sausalito in 1979.

Charlie Fullerton, director of the California Department of Fish and Game, was present at that meeting, and he liked the idea of commercial fishermen taxing themselves to help propagate the resource. Soon thereafter, the salmon stamp was born into existence along with a stamp committee to oversee its one objective: to raise more salmon.

Raising salmon to smolt-size and trucking them past the Delta was wildly successful. Four years after its inception, California had the record year for landings in 1988, and fishermen enjoyed 25 years of salmon abundance thereafter. The 300 percent increase of the ocean abundance of salmon was all the result of raising and trucking smolt size salmon. When the trucking of smolts bogged down in bureaucratic and ideological missteps decades later, Mike stepped in and took the Merva W up the Sacramento River and loaded it with salmon smolts for the next consecutive six years. He barged them down to the Golden Gate in the Merva W and released them.

He personally showed the Department of Fish and Wildlife how to save the salmon from extinction. This year, 1.3 million salmon smolts were released by Fish and Wildlife at the Golden Gate — the total number of all hatchery production in California went to sea from trucks at this location.

Mike requested that no Celebration of Life nor any other type of public memorial be held in his honor, and his partner and wife, Kim, will honor that request. He only wished that people might privately raise a glass and toast him when he was gone. An era has passed. Mike, know we toast you and the memories you gave us.

Ernie Koepf F/V Ursula B Half Moon Bay, Calif.