Taking the Bait : Mona Lisa Crew’s Big Mission: Catch Tiny Anchovies

For the live-bait boat Mona Lisa, the day didn’t start too well.

She had put out from Dana Point in the 2:30 chill of the morning, and three hours later was offshore of Oceanside, about 20 miles down the coast. After an hour of circling, her sonar and fish-finding electronic gear located a school of anchovies, and she streamed her huge net in the early dawn waters just as the lights ashore began winking off, leaving the sky and seas a depressing gray.

The results of this first “set” of the net were disappointing.

“About 125 scoops of anchovy, 20 pounds per scoop. Not very good. Not very good at all,” said John Mello, Mona Lisa’s skipper. He is accustomed to thinking of anchovies in terms of tons.

This was, indeed, not good at all, because on this particular day, many people were counting on Mona Lisa’s performance. She had been laid up for the previous 48 hours for repairs to her net, and a barge in the harbor, which stores the thousands of live anchovies needed by commercial fishermen in Dana Point Harbor, had gone empty.

Mona Lisa, working under contract for Dana Wharf Sportfishing, and one of only about a dozen such vessels between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border, is solely responsible for the barge’s supplies.

The anxiety of her crew increased about half an hour later when the net was set again a little farther down the coast near the entrance to Oceanside Harbor. The three-man crew--Mike Mello, 26, the skipper’s brother; Robert Machado, 31; and Tony Spagnolini, 50--went through the routine.

Their big boots were awash, sometimes to the knees, in the seawater that swirled over the afterdeck, as they put out a buoy hooked to one end of the net. The boat began to make a large loop, rolling with the glassy swells as the white floats attached to the top edge of the net rattled out over the stern. The corks gradually formed a writhing circle over an area larger than a football field.

John Mello brought the boat back and closed the circle at the buoy, which was snatched aboard the heaving deck, bringing with it one end of the net. With bare hands in the cool morning air, the crew brought the two ends of the wet, cold, abrasive nylon mesh together in the center of the stern.

The ends were passed over the drum of a great winch, and slowly the white cork circle grew smaller. Gulls, ghostly in the dim light, swooped in.

John Mello picked up a small sledgehammer and began pounding the steel deck, changing the tone by hitting different sections.

“I don’t know whether he’s trying to scare the fish back into the pocket of the net, (which in fact was the case) or just keeping us awake,” Spagnolini said, laughing.

When the net’s circle had been reduced to a few yards, it was brought along the starboard side. Silvery anchovies twitched and wriggled. But they were few, and they were mixed with “junk fish”--little California pompano, butterfish, baby bonitas, a bat ray. “Dump it,” said John Mello, adding in disgust, “Not worth hauling in.”

There was little breeze, but large swells were running, breaking on the beach with a roar about 200 yards away while Mike Mello, Machado and Spagnolini went through the heavy work of bringing the net aboard and coiling it carefully for the next set. John Mello, at the wheel, fretted about the way things were going.

“We usually fill our tanks in one set and go home,” he said.

His worry was shared by the crew:

- Mike Mello, whose grandfather (also John’s) had come from the Azores, whose father Art and Uncle Joe had built the Mona Lisa in 1964 in Huntington Beach; member of a family known up and down the coast as among the best of bait-boat operators.

- Robert Machado, 31, who has worked on bait boats for 14 years, starting in San Diego, and now with the Mona Lisa for the last seven years.

- Tony Spagnolini, 51 come July 21, 15 years a Marine, wounded in both Korea and Vietnam; garrulous, tough, with a soft spot for little kids; entered Stanford University on the GI bill with no high school diploma and earned degrees in ichthyology and Oriental semantics; former deputy in the Harbor Patrol and one-time teacher of a course in commercial fishing at Saddleback College.

To a man, they like their work and believe in its importance, even though it’s seven days a week, much of the time at night, for at least six months of the year.

William Nott, president of the California Sportfishing Assn., thinks pretty highly of them and their counterparts on other boats, too.

He said there are 1.5 million sportfishermen in Southern California, creating a $1-billion industry, and that by far the greater portion of these fishermen prefer live bait.

“Not to sound corny, the bait-boat operators are the unsung heroes of this business,” Nott said. “Without them the whole thing could just sort of fold up.”

And, despite two unfortunate net sets that day last week, there were no signs of folding up on Mona Lisa.

Less than 15 minutes after the second effort had ended in a dumping, John Mello had the boat over another school. The net and its floats streamed out again, the big circle formed, the winch whined, the hammer pounded on the deck, and the net closed.

Along the starboard side, silver hordes of anchovy shimmered in the water-brailer, a device for dipping the catch from the net into the boat’s tanks. The crew worked swiftly and smoothly, hoisting about 600 pounds of anchovies with each scoop of the brailer, pouring the 4-inch-long fish into the tanks, into which 40 tons of seawater had been pumped. Also by means of pumps, that water was being changed every 15 minutes.

“The name of the game is ‘live bait,’ ” John Mello said. “Without oxygen, they’d all die in minutes.”

But as they worked, the Mona Lisa drifted toward the breakers.

John Mello scrambled up the ladder to the wheelhouse, put the idling engine in gear and, as one big comber broke over the stern, headed for deeper water.

Machado laughed. “That’s called wave-hopping,” he said.

More than half of the anchovies that had been corralled in the net had to be abandoned--to the delight of a screaming cloud of gulls--”but we got 2 1/2 tons in the tanks,” John Mello said.

The 20-mile cruise from Dana Point to Oceanside, which had taken only three hours early that morning, turned into a four-hour return trip for the laden vessel.

Fishermen who had heard that Mona Lisa had gone for bait couldn’t wait for her to get back to Dana Point. One after another, 15 boatloads in all came alongside for dip-nets of anchovies.

And when she reached the bait barge, there were still enough anchovies to fill eight of the holding tanks.