All shipping stopped in US west coast ports on 27 September when a labour dispute between ports and longshoremen boiled over, causing the lockout of some 10,500 workers.
One week into the port closure, Rick Mayer of Marcus Foods in Camarillo, California, said that he might have to stop buying fish unless he could start shipping soon. A fleet of some 200 container ships collected off Los Angeles, taxing available anchorage space. In Puget Sound, 50 vessels waited to offload at the ports of Tacoma and Seattle, Washington. Coastwide, the equivalent of 680,000 semi-truck loads awaited offloading from container ships.
Since the resumption of port operations on 8 October, when longshoremen were ordered back to work by the federal government, ports have been attempting to clear enormous stacks of containers that built up. The Pacific Maritime Association estimated it would take six to eight weeks to catch up with shipping.
"We can still load containers, and take them to the port. But as far as the sailing date, that's uncertain. We don't know when those containers will be shipped," says Anthony Su, a squid and sardine broker in southern California. "It's still a mess. It takes a lot of extra effort to make things happen now."
There have been no reports of lost fishing opportunity due to the shipping crisis. However, one albacore buying station supposedly decreased its purchases, and exporters sitting on blackcod shipments to Japan fretted about changing currency rates as their product languished.