Bernard Friedman’s typical day starts around dawn, when the first rays of sunlight paint the Santa Ynez Mountains pink. As smells of hot coffee and diesel gas waft through the Santa Barbara Harbor, he hops onto his 35-foot boat Perseverance — so named for the 13 years he courted his wife, but a trait he’s forced to exhibit endlessly — and heads out to sea.
Unlike most Santa Barbara fishermen, from urchin divers to black cod long-liners, who must navigate for miles to reach unpredictable fishing grounds, it takes less than 15 minutes for Friedman to pull up to his sure-thing site, a 25-acre underwater grid of mesh ropes connected by red, blue, and green buoys located less than a mile off of Hendry’s Beach. A few minutes later, as the sunrise starts reflecting off the glass windows of The Boathouse restaurant, Friedman is already hauling in his morning catch, a few hundred pounds of mussels that he grew from tiny seeds to plump shells over the past year. They’re sheared off the clumpy ropes onto the spinning bristles of a specially designed scrubbing machine and will later be hand-washed on deck and dumped into the purple mesh bags that find their way to restaurants and seafood dealers hundreds of miles away.
He’s repeated this routine most days of the past 12 years, yet the 2014 haul was the biggest yet: more than 160,000 pounds of mussels, and the first time he’d ever maxed out the farm’s current capacity. “I can’t grow enough mussels to satisfy the demand,” explains Friedman, who fields orders on his cell phone from the Santa Barbara Fish Market, Harbor Seafood, and Kanaloa Seafood while on the boat. “We harvest exactly what people need, and you can be eating it tonight. What we do is unparalleled in most farming industries. We harvest to order.”