Chasing the wild past

The night is overcast, obscuring the stars and turning the Pacific black and glassy as the Endurance works its way south from San Pedro. Half a mile away, the lights of Huntington Beach twinkle. Pretty as they are, it’s another kind of light Vince Lauro is looking for. Lauro is skipper of the 57-foot fishing boat and, since this is fall, he’s hunting for sardines.

What he’s looking for specifically is the warm milky glow of bioluminescent plankton, microscopic sea creatures that, when alarmed, give off light. And there’s little that scares them more than schools of sardines, which occupy the rung just above them on the food chain. For centuries, fishermen have looked for this same light to find fish.

“Over there,” Lauro says, pointing aft. “Do you see it?” It takes a minute for the eyes to adjust, but there it is, like underwater heat lightning.

Lauro is one of the last of the San Pedro sardine fishermen, and while all fishermen have to deal with the vicissitudes of the sea and of public taste, sardine fishermen have an additional burden -- the fish itself. Periodically, sardines simply vanish -- sometimes for decades at a time.

Today the fish that were once feared to be gone forever are back in very healthy numbers, especially in the fall and winter months when the Southern California season peaks. Furthermore, they’re even bordering on the trendy -- something the old-timers have a hard time adjusting to. Now, it’s the fishermen who are nearly extinct.

The crew of the Endurance isn’t going without a fight. On this warm October night, clad in brightly colored slickers, they take their places along the back of the boat and ready the net. One clambers into the 17-foot skiff that rides piggyback atop the stern of the larger boat.

Setting the net is the key to sardine fishing. It’s not a matter of “drop it and they will come.” The wily fish never will. And neither can a fishing boat towing a net speed through the ocean, scooping up everything in its way. These fish are fast, able to outrun any boat. They have to be hunted and trapped.

The mark of a good skipper is how well he can do this. It’s not unusual for a boat to spend an hour or more on top of a school of fish, the captain waiting until he’s absolutely certain he knows where the fish are and which direction they’re heading before he commits to releasing the net.

Finally Lauro shouts “Molla!” -- Italian for “Let it go” -- and the crew bursts into action. The skiff slides off the back, anchoring one end of the net. Lauro shoves the throttle forward and the boat rears as it accelerates, cutting a tight turn.

In less than a minute, the Endurance bumps against the skiff, the circle of the net complete. Lauro rushes to the rail and begins to curse explosively. There’s no light in the center. He runs to the other side: There it is, dashing away. It doesn’t look good; the fish are so fast they swim away clean under the boat.

The crew hauls in the net, working carefully in case the dire predictions are wrong. First they tighten the heavy line, cinching the purse closed at the bottom. Then they retrieve the cork line, shrinking the floating circle. A pair of seals appears out of nowhere and takes turns diving over the net to filch what fish they can.

A power winch does most of the heavy lifting these days, but it can only do so much. The crew still must gather at the net and grasp it in a cold wet embrace as the winch is reset. It takes a half-hour of backbreaking labor before the equipment is back aboard. The reward? A half-dozen spiny sculpin and a couple of sardines.

Lauro tries to make a joke but it sounds forced through clenched teeth. “That’s why they call it fishing and not catching.”

The Latin name of the Pacific sardine is Sardinops sagax, which can be loosely translated as “the wily sardine.” It is a peculiarly vexing fish, the population of which ebbs and floods like the tide (Atlantic sardines are actually either pilchards or juvenile herring, called sprats).

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It’s feast or famine

In the early part of the 20th century, sardines were so plentiful there seemed to be no bottom to the supply. In 1937, California fishermen caught more than 700,000 tons. A little more than a decade later, the fish began to disappear and, by the mid-1960s, the total catch for the entire West Coast was less than 1,000 tons.

Just as folks were beginning to talk about sardines being fished to the brink of extinction, they returned. By 1992, there were nearly 18,000 tons caught in California. And in 2001, the last year for which statistics are available, state fishermen took more than 50,000 tons for the third season in a row.

It turns out that’s just the way the fish are. Analyzing fossilized scales found in sediment in the Santa Barbara Basin, scientists found that over the last 1,700 years sardines have regularly disappeared from the sea and just as regularly returned. In that span there have been nine major cycles of population collapse and recovery.

“We find that this [current] recovery is not unlike those of the past in its rate, magnitude and overall evolution,” wrote Tim Baumgartner, the lead researcher, now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “Neither was the sardine collapse that began in the 1940s unlike earlier collapses.”

Baumgartner was careful to point out that he was not implying that over-fishing had no impact on sardine populations, but rather that the population fluctuates regardless of fishing. Still, the current level is believed to be an easily sustainable number, especially given the disappearing fishing industry. Even with strict quotas in place, the harvest rarely comes close to filling them.

Despite all of the fish’s unpredictable comings and goings, sardines helped build San Pedro. The Yugoslavs from the Dalmatian coast and Italians from the southern island of Ischia founded the fishery at the turn of the last century with their innovative purse seine nets, and to this day they dominate the fleet. A substantial number of Sicilians joined them after World War I.

It was an early dip in the Southern California sardine catch that provided Americans with one of their favorite sandwiches. In 1903, owning a San Pedro sardine cannery but having no sardines, Alfred P. Halfhill packed an experimental run of 200 cases of canned albacore tuna -- plentiful along the Southern California coast -- and a million sack lunches were born.

Multi-generational families seem to be the rule in the industry. Lauro’s father, Ralph, was a San Pedro fisherman and beyond him stretch many generations of seafaring Ischians. The processing company to which he sells his catch, State Fish, is headed by Vanessa DeLuca, the third generation of her family in the industry. Her 105-year-old grandfather, Ferdinando di Bernardo, is still giving advice.

Whether there will be a next generation is a subject of constant debate. The consensus among fishermen seems to be that their industry can’t last another 10 years. The fact that fishermen were saying that 20 years ago (and probably with more justification) does not disprove their argument.

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An almost-lost art

The San Pedro fishing fleet, which numbered nearly 500 boats in 1937, is down to fewer than two dozen today. Of the 16 canneries that once occupied San Pedro and neighboring Terminal Island, none are left. The last closed in 2001. Most of the work has fled to low-wage countries, first to American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the Philippines and now to Malaysia.

Today most of the sardines caught off San Pedro are frozen. Then they may be shipped overseas to be canned for pet food or sent to New Zealand and Australia to be used as feed in the newly established bluefin tuna farms there. Some are used as bait for long-line tuna fishermen in San Diego. And a very small percentage is sold fresh locally.

It’s 10:15 p.m. when another mass of lights shows up off the bow. “Let’s try it again,” Lauro says. He points to the horizontal sonar screen. “What we’re looking for is a spot about the size of a quarter.” As the Endurance pulls closer, it’s clear this school is much bigger than that -- more like a 50-cent piece. And when he checks the vertical sonar, it shows fish stacked solid from the surface to the bottom 90 feet below. Wary after the last set, Lauro tries not to show his excitement.

Once again the crew deploys. Once again the shouted, “Molla!” Once again Lauro guns the boat into a tight turn. But this time is different. The fish seem to be solidly in the net’s noose. And what was a vague milky glow suddenly explodes into a frenetic underwater fireworks show as the fish sense the trap.

The mass swells and ebbs, pulsing. Closer to the surface, fish streak across like skyrockets. Lauro, determined not to get skunked again, runs to the other side of the boat and begins chucking seal bombs, underwater firecrackers designed to scare seals out of the net, one after another. There’s no way these fish are going to slip out of his net.

It is an awesome sight. Within the tight confines of this closed circle the surface is boiling with thrashing fish. “They don’t want to die,” Lauro says. “No, they don’t want to die.” But he’s a hunter and there’s not a trace of sympathy in his voice.

As the fish come to the surface, it becomes obvious that this is a school of Pacific mackerel -- not what Lauro was looking for but a minor windfall nonetheless. While sardines fetch about $100 a ton at the processor, mackerel bring in $150. The pay would have been even better if the fish had been Spanish or jack mackerel, a great eating fish that pays $500 a ton.

A heavy metal bell attached to a fat blue hose swings over and lowers into the mass of squirming fish. With the flick of a switch, it vacuums the catch from the ocean into the boat.

After a moment’s hesitation, a river of fish begins flooding down the chute. A crewman stands by with a plastic-bladed shovel to direct them down the hatches into the boat’s hold, which is filled with chilled 32-degree ocean water to prevent the fish from spoiling.

At first, the number of fish being taken seems simply unbelievable. After a while, it becomes numbing. They are no longer fish, but a mass of undifferentiated product. And still they keep coming. At almost midnight, after more than an hour of steady pumping, the Endurance’s holds are filled, something like 35 tons of fish. And still the nets are full of squirming mackerel.

Lauro gets on the radio and calls his buddy Johnny Aiello over. For the next hour, the fish flood into his hold, another 35 tons. Finally, another boat, the Maria T, comes alongside and sucks up the remainder -- between 15 and 20 tons.

That’s about a $5,000 night for the Endurance, maybe a little more. But, of course, there are expenses. A boat like this would run about $700,000, if you bought it new. The net alone would cost $80,000. And then there’s insurance: Lauro says his jumped from $11,700 a year to $38,000 right after Sept. 11, without him having filed a single claim.

“I’m the last of it. I’ve got two sons and no way are they going into the industry,” says Lauro. Of course, his own father swore the same thing. “He really didn’t want me to do this,” he says. “It killed my mother when I started to fish. She wanted me to get an education.”

But the sea does call. After crewing on his dad’s boat during vacations growing up, Lauro quit school in the 10th grade to fish full time. “I knew what I wanted to do,” he says.

And it has been a good night. After 2 a.m. and packed solid with fish, the Endurance finally turns and waddles for home. Quickly the boat is picked up by a pod of a half-dozen Pacific white-sided dolphins that surf playfully in the bow wave, lighted from beneath so they look like ghosts, or gods.

From time to time one or two split off, veering to the side to do a little fishing of their own. When they come back, their trails glow in the water and they cruise as straight and fast as a torpedo. It seems like a dream.