Driven by a dream that the one that got away may be coming back, volunteers comb Malibu Creek in search of the steelhead trout. : A FISH STORY?

One sunny March afternoon, five college students driving home from the beach decided on a whim to touch up their tans. They pulled over to the side of Malibu Canyon Road, along a deserted stretch in the Santa Monica Mountains, and set their sand chairs out in a row.

They were not expecting company. But soon a middle-aged man in khaki shorts and a matching long-sleeved shirt emerged from the canyon depths. He pushed his sweaty blond hair away from his spectacles and strode toward the old gray convertible he had left by the roadside more than four hours before.

The college students stared in silence. Then one spied the man’s rod and reel. “Hey,” the young man hollered, “what kind of fish were you going for down there?”

Giles Manwaring looked straight at his questioner.

“Bass,” he lied.

Manwaring had good reason to keep his secret. If word got out too soon, he was certain, it would set off a stampede to the clear, rocky stream that winds along the canyon bottom.

The truth: The state strongly suspects that Malibu Creek is home to the nation’s southernmost run of the legendary steelhead trout.

Manwaring, a 47-year-old building contractor, was an eager recruit in the effort to find out for sure. The prospect of local steelhead, which grow more than twice as large as ordinary trout, has dazzled dozens of volunteers since the beginning of the year. They spent more than three months walking the creek’s banks, wading its waters and even scuba diving; state biologists are continuing the quest in Malibu and San Diego labs.

Excitement is high among those who fish for sport. If the steelhead are running in Malibu Creek, a prized northern giant is available in the Los Angeles Basin, where freshwater fishermen far outnumber any kind of freshwater fish.

Curiosity is strong among wildlife experts, too. If steelhead are running in Malibu Creek, they wonder why the fish returned to an urban, southern setting where the species died out long ago. They wonder if a resurgence here means the steelhead population, which has declined statewide, is strong enough to stage a comeback--to adapt, with a little help, to a changed environment shaped by modern industry.

To anglers and biologists alike, the steelhead is a magnificent and mysterious fish. It begins life as a rounded, dark rainbow stream trout, slims to a cigar shape and turns bright silver, then transforms its kidneys to adapt to salt water and heads for the open sea.

Like the salmon, which is hundreds of times more common, the steelhead trout generally returns to its native creek to spawn in an annual run. Unlike salmon, the steelhead often survives the grueling reproduction process to stay in the stream for a few months. The hardy steelhead may then swim out to the ocean again, where it gorges on a rich diet of shrimp and smaller fish. When it comes back to its creek to spawn once more, it can weigh anywhere from 6 to 32 pounds.

The steelhead’s tremendous size and notorious strength offer the ultimate challenge to freshwater fishermen. Every spawning season, legions of anglers spend hundreds of dollars apiece to travel to the steelhead’s haunts in northern California--especially on the Klamath, Smith and Trinity rivers--and in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

Scores leave having tasted the tender meat of campfire-cooked

steelhead (after snapping a souvenir photo first). Scores more go home having failed, but even they have memories of the duels they have fought, watching their prey in the translucent waters, the steelhead watching right back.

“It’s a red-meat fish,” said John Schubert, former conservation chairman of the 350-member Sierra Pacific Flyfishers, an angling group based in Van Nuys. “Red-meat fish makes a fisherman’s blood churn up.”

In centuries past, nearly every Southern California river boasted an annual steelhead spawning run. But since 1900, the taming of the land has killed off runs in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties. Dams blocked the steelhead’s way to the coolest areas, where the fish spawn. Smooth concrete channels replaced the gravelly stream beds where the eggs are hidden. Runoff from construction and farm fields polluted the waters. Springs were choked off and creek beds dried up.

The last steelhead run in the urbanized south, researchers thought, was at San Juan Creek, in Orange County, in 1969.

Sewage Plant the Key

“It would be an amazing thing to see steelhead back in this concrete jungle,” said Dave Drake, a biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game whose territory includes Los Angeles and Orange counties, along with western Riverside County.

Ironically, the steelhead may have been lured to this single southern spot in Malibu by a sewage treatment plant--a symbol of the technology and development blamed for wiping out the steelhead in the first place.

The Las Virgenes sewage treatment district, which serves the west San Fernando Valley, opened its Tapia plant in 1969. Every day, Tapia discharged about 2 million gallons of treated water into Malibu Creek. But even with the extra water, the stream continued to wither away each summer, as do most creeks in these parts.

After the Tapia plant expanded in 1972, the increase in effluent created a year-round flow of water. By 1984, Tapia was putting 3.5 million gallons of treated water into Malibu Creek each day.

The higher volume, experts believe, allowed steelhead to swim into the creek past celebrities’ beach homes at Malibu Colony, past the Cross Creek Shopping Center, past the imposing estates of Serra Retreat, to state-owned property in a more natural condition where the huge trout can peacefully spawn.

With correct conditions restored, the theory goes, a group of errant steelhead may have rushed up the creek from the ocean during the 1970s and established a spawn once more at Malibu.

Water May Be Diverted

But these circumstances may change. Next year, Tapia is preparing to sell about 2.5 million gallons of the daily discharge for irrigation. Most of the water once bound for the creek will end up instead on Ventura Freeway landscaping, and on parks, median strips and school campuses in Agoura Hills and Westlake Village.

To Tapia officials, the move is sensible. It helps conserve drinking water and recoups costs, so sewage rates can be kept down.

Steelhead enthusiasts see things differently. “If the sale of all that water winds up drying up the stream all summer, it would be terrible,” said Barrett W. McInerney, a regional vice president of California Trout Inc., a San Francisco-based conservation group that is called CalTrout by its 2,500 members.

If the steelhead are repopulating Malibu Creek, CalTrout and state officials hope to make the stream their front line in the battle to keep the huge fish off the endangered species list. And they want to start now, well before the steelhead is threatened with extinction.

California has only about 20% of the steelhead population it had 100 years ago. Even in the north, where hundreds of thousands of steelhead swim up the rivers each year, the numbers are decreasing, largely because of lumber operations. In recent years, millions of state and federal dollars have been committed to projects to improve steelhead habitats there.

Central-area coastal streams have far fewer steelhead. The closest “semi-viable” run to Los Angeles is in the Ventura River, a state census shows.

Ways to ‘Draw the Line’

The die-out of steelhead has been “an inexorable march from south to north,” CalTrout President Richard May said. “And so here we are, trying to draw the line and say, ‘That’s enough.’ ”

May talks of having the state buy Tapia’s treated water in order to keep it flowing into Malibu Creek. He talks of dynamiting a turn-of-the-century dam about 2 1/2 miles up the creek that stops the steelhead from swimming any farther.

Bob Rawstrom, the state’s chief of inland fisheries, talks of closing the creek to fishing during steelhead spawning season until the population has increased. At the least, he said, he would like to require anglers to release any trout they catch there.

But before any steps are taken, the state must be certain that steelhead indeed live in Malibu Creek. Skeptics abound. They attribute news of sightings in recent years to inexperienced eyes seeing hatchery trout washed into the creek from a nearby stocked lake during heavy rains. Or they grin and wink, cautioning that there is truth behind the stereotype of the fisherman who . . . exaggerates.

“There’s no doubt they were once here,” said Louis Busch, a long-time Malibu real estate agent who reminisces about sneaking to the creek 40 years ago at night to capture steelhead with a pitchfork and a flashlight.

But in his office on Pacific Coast Highway, Busch pointed to a rainfall chart showing near-drought conditions in Malibu during the late 1950s and early 1960s. “They were gone after that. And they haven’t come back,” he said. “There may be trout there, but they aren’t steelhead.”

To convince people like Busch, Manwaring found himself making his way slowly down the steep walls of Malibu Canyon on March 5. He grasped at the limbs of live oaks and brush to keep his balance. He scrambled over man-sized boulders and took care to dodge the poison oak.

Nearly 45 minutes after starting out, he stood at the west bank of Malibu Creek. Above him, three huge slabs of rock leaned together to form a craggy pyramid. To his left, falls cascaded down the concrete face of the old Rindge Dam, built to serve the needs of a cattle empire in the days when Malibu was known as Rancho Malibu. Spray and sun merged in a light, bright mist.

Manwaring took a thermometer from his backpack and tossed it in the stream, where it lay glistening on the bottom among scattered twigs and wavy ridges of sand. The reading was 60 degrees, a good sign. Steelhead like their water cool.

He reached for his five-foot graphite rod.

When the line suddenly went taut, 300 yards downstream, something glittered briefly in the water. “There it goes,” Manwaring shouted.

Smolt Caught, Freed

He switched to a converted fly rod and placed orange strands of salmon roe on the hook. Then, standing on an Africa-shaped rock in the middle of the creek, he pulled out a seven-inch silvery fish. “This is a juvenile, a smolt,” he said, referring to a steelhead of one or two years that has changed color, getting ready to migrate to sea. He bent and let his catch squirm back into the stream.

Manwaring wanted to believe. If sheer desire could have brought the steelhead to Malibu, he would have single-handedly clogged the creek with thousands of the giant fish.

As a boy in Santa Cruz, he lived far enough north to hear local fishermen talk incessantly of steelhead. He caught his first on the San Lorenzo River when he was 10, and it weighed a pound for every year he had lived.

The biggest he hooked was an 18-pounder on the Siletz River on the central Oregon coast, when he was a graduate student in zoology at Oregon State University.

In 1969, Manwaring moved to Malibu, ending up in the construction business. Although he heard rumors about local steelhead in the late 1970s, when he headed for the creek, “all I caught was bluegill,” he said.

Then, last November, he invited the CalTrout regional president, a man named Jim Edmondson, to address the Westwood Village chapter of the Izaak Walton League, a conservation group. Manwaring is chapter president.

A Casual Comment

In the back room of a Culver City steak house, Edmondson showed slides of trout--regular trout. Then he casually mentioned that the state had taken quite an interest in the possibility of steelhead in Malibu Creek.

By the time the meeting ended, Manwaring had offered to coordinate surveys of the 2 1/2-mile section of stream below the dam every Saturday for almost four months.

The program started in January. Fishing clubs supplied the manpower. They were a disparate bunch. The surveyors’ occupations ranged from city lot-clearing supervisor to television art director, their ages from the 20s to the 60s. They traveled to the creek from San Pedro and Inglewood, Pasadena and Van Nuys.

One man caused a stir by telling others on his survey team that he had caught a 14-pound steelhead in the creek a few years before. “I have a picture of it in my office,” he said. “It sets right beside the picture of my wife.” Another said he had given up a steelhead trip to Oregon that weekend to concentrate on finding out if there is a source nearby.

Each team noted the time, air and water temperatures, and whether the stream was cloudy or clear. Each team carefully kept a log of all species of fish observed.

Over the course of the program, the volunteers discovered a total of 50 small fish, apparently steelhead smolts.

But they did not find a single adult steelhead.

Manwaring was discouraged. But he still had faith.

All those smolts were circumstantial evidence. Something obviously had been spawning in the creek the last few years.

And now that he was paying attention again, he realized the steelhead rumors had never abated. They had only grown stronger.

There was the Malibu Canyon resident who said he scoffed at steelhead reports until 1980, when a friend came to visit carrying a 28 1/2-inch trout. There was the high school teacher from Chula Vista who claimed that this year he had an eight-pounder on the hook until it snapped the line.

Then, on Sunday, March 23, a couple of the Sierra Pacific Flyfishers who had been assigned to survey duty the previous day decided to return unofficially to try again.

About a quarter-mile from the dam, they came upon a small sand bank on the east side of the creek. Tim Ryan had just placed a six-pound trout, 27 1/2 inches long, on the beach.

It was too large to be anything but a steelhead.

Ryan, a 27-year-old electrician from Lawndale, had never been to the creek before. His friend and former neighbor, a dental technician named Carlos Serret, had brought him there.

About 11 a.m., “I was just casting and casting. I saw a flash of silver,” Ryan said later. “My friend went all crazy; he was jumping in the water.”

He Barely Could Grasp It

The fish had been swimming upstream when Serret waded right up and clawed at it. His hands barely fit around the gills. He squeezed as hard as he could, grabbing hold. Then he herded the fish downstream.

Fifteen minutes after his first glimpse, Ryan hauled the first steelhead of his life out of the creek.

A small cluster of orange globules fell from the fish onto the sand. The globules were eggs, each one a potential steelhead. The fish was a female; she was trying, too late, to spawn.

“I felt kind of bad about that, but I wasn’t going to let it go,” Ryan said.

The Flyfishers asked Ryan for the head. He did not want to relinquish it, but he agreed to pose for a few color slides.

Experts say a trout that size would hold 5,000 to 10,000 eggs. When Ryan cut open the steelhead at his apartment that night, they came rolling out. He decided to feed them to the tropical fish in his aquarium.

The rest of the steelhead was baked with a stuffing of bread crumbs, butter and onions. It became a feast for six.

News of Ryan’s catch spurred Manwaring on desperately. “It’s very important to me to see one,” he said. “It’s almost a calling.”

The survey program was over. He decided to try a new tack.

In mid-April, Manwaring met at the creek with three men he had asked for help. One was his nephew, Dana Ross. The others were friends, John Anderson and Warren Jones. All were experienced scuba divers.

The thermometer in the water read 58 degrees. The three divers donned wet suits, fins, goggles and gloves, and started swimming slowly upstream.

At the deep pools, Ross kicked down to investigate further. In the shallows, Anderson placed one hand before the other to propel himself along. Jones checked the undercuts, where the stream flowed into rocky outcroppings. They found a small turtle and a catfish.

In the last pool, Ross discovered a smolt. “It’s about 12 to 14 inches, about a quarter pound,” he called from the water. “It was so pale that you almost couldn’t see it.”

If the adults were somewhere spawning, “they’re all in one place,” Ross said, “and I can’t find them.”

The next step was to turn to science. Biologists had been writing in journals since 1974 about using fish ear bones, called otoliths, to differentiate between migratory steelhead and the common rainbow trout.

This is their reasoning: A steelhead at maturity is about twice the size of an adult rainbow trout, so its eggs are about twice the size of a rainbow trout’s--and therefore, the nucleus of every steelhead cell should be twice as large as a rainbow trout’s.

So Manwaring delivered three smolts he had caught to a biologist who works as a ranger at Malibu Lagoon State Beach. Last month, the ranger dissected the fish and extracted the tiny, triangular ear bones. He stored the smolt ear bones and three sets of bones from stock trout in separate vials of glycerin. Then he handed the containers over to William E. Tippets, a San Diego-based resource ecologist for the state park system.

Tippets had compared ear bones from various types of trout in 1979. He found then that any nuclei more than 0.4 millimeters wide were “in the steelhead range.”

Microscopic Measurement

Last Tuesday, Tippets took the six vials to a cinder block-walled office at California State University, San Diego, where he borrowed the use of a microscope with a measuring device.

He used a pair of forceps to draw a pair of ear bones from the first vial and set to work. He marked down the result: 0.4 millimeters wide. The label showed it was one of the smolts.

By the fifth sample, he was muttering to himself. “That’s about as big an otolith as I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The width is a full millimeter. That little fish could have grown up to be a 27-incher.”

But he was not ready to declare a steelhead run. He said that he would be uncomfortable drawing conclusions without several dozen more pairs of ear bones to examine.

“I will say this,” he said. “These may indeed be the real thing. It’s very likely that they are steelhead.”

The search, though, was far from over.