Angler Changes His Luck on Southland Piers : Anyone Can Grab a Pole and Bait, but Then It’s Up to the Fish

As a fisherman, the old-timer was strictly a wimp.

For decades, he had fished the waters of the world, and caught nothing.

In the ‘40s, he had trolled for plump salmon in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, and caught nothing.

In the ‘50s, he had dropped a stout line off the fantail of a Korea-bound troopship, and caught nothing.

In the ‘60s, goaded by a Viking giant named Kaldestad, the Wimp had dragged a multihooked rig called an “otter” across a crystal Norwegian lake, and caught nothing.

In the ‘70s, in Aviemore, Scotland, he had taken fly-casting lessons from a grizzled gillie called Campbell. He had learned to drop the fly into a dime-sized spot 30 yards away. The fish were elsewhere.

And one evening, after a hard day of catching nothing in Peniche, Portugal, the Wimp had abandoned the whole sordid enterprise. Tawny curs had barked, and bronze, barefoot children had tossed pebbles and nudged themselves as he trudged by, calling to their playmates to come see “The Man Who Never Caught a Fish.”

In the ‘80s, grounded, the Wimp had haunted the piers of Southern California, wondering at the secrets of the men, women and children who stood dreamlike over the Pacific and hauled in sleek silver specimens with daunting regularity.

The old urge was quickened. Could it be done? Would it require expertise? What would it cost? Could one eat one’s trophies?

Mainly, though, could a fish be caught ? Wouldn’t that be something to tell the grandchildren, not to mention the insufferable urchins of Peniche?

Malibu Pier. Open 6 a.m.-6 p.m. Rental poles $5. Bait $2 (no live bait) at Bait & Tackle shop at end of pier.

On a sunny holiday morning, some 20 fisherpeople are already hard at work, waiting. As some depart, others move in. Most just stand there. They are an astoundingly eclectic bunch: all ages, sexes, races, nationalities and degrees of exaggeration.

At first acquaintance, they seem a taciturn lot. As day deflates into dusk, though, they reveal themselves to be a fascinating, even congenial cabal of individualists.

Each has his own theory of fishing, his own bait preference, his own method. Methods of others are tolerated, but with thinly disguised amusement (until the “others” actually land a fish). In time, of course, each has a story, some of them even believeable.

By early afternoon, signs are favorable for a Big Catch: Minnows cruise the clear water; sea birds bob, weave and plunge; the sea is smooth. Nobody catches anything.

Nobody cares .

“Even if nothing’s biting, I enjoy the scene,” says Frank Warga, a tousled 22-year-old in cutaway jeans with serious holes and a T-shirt reading “Eat Fish or Die.” “Nah, you don’t really need to buy bait. Somebody will always lend you something. I’m after halibut, and mackerel. Mackerel’s ‘junk fish’ to some, but I make a nice soup out of ‘em, heads and all. Powerful stuff.

“Whatever, fishing’s relaxing. This is what heaven ought to be like.”

On the other side of the pier, Umberto Garcia, from Topanga by way of El Salvador, plays a tango, very softly, on his huge blaster radio. “Soothes the fish,” he explains.

Beside him, Vicky and Elmer, a middle-aged couple, settle in after a drive down from Canoga Park. Elmer, whose baseball cap reads “Dad,” hurls a whopping hodgepodge of weights, bobbers and hooks far off the pier. Vicky, more fastidious, affixes her anchovy bait just so and eases her line over the side. “We’re not eager,” she says. “Just come down to shake the Valley dust and enjoy the sea.”

Someone lands a mackerel. Warga catches a bonito. The fish are biting. Suddenly, Garcia’s line heads sideways with a screaming “Zzzzzz!” Everyone stops to watch him fight what must be a whopper. Garcia zigs when the fish zigs, zags when it zags. Then the fish crosses him up, zigging when Garcia is zagging. He reels up an empty line, sheared above his lost tackle.

“Hadda have been a barracuda,” says Jack MacLain, a red-headed Irishman with a good-natured opinion on everything.

Garcia shakes his head. “Tuna,” he says. “Line too light. I’d have eaten for a week.”

The Wimp has rented a pole and attached anchovies, then mussels. Lots of them. He catches nothing.

Tyro tip from Bob Konzen, avuncular maven of the Malibu Pier Bait & Tackle shop: “No, you don’t need a permit to fish from a pier. Just a pole, really, and hooks and lines and bait. A bucket. A knife. A pair of pliers. Something to cut a line. Patience. Hope.” Above Konzen, a plaque: “The gods do not deduct from one’s life span the time spent fishing.”

Santa Monica Pier. Open 24 hours. Hire poles, Tuesday-Sunday only, $2 an hour, at the Rock Shop, which also sells bait, $3 a bag.

The pier, what’s left of it, is a real trip, especially on Saturday night. Hordes of kibitzers--some sober, others from planets not yet discovered--mill among the serious fisherfolk, ogling the creatures from the briny, offering suggestions (“Marshmallows, man! Fish love ‘em.”)

The pier, though, is quite safe, manned as it is by the Santa Monica Harbor Patrol, 24 hours. Says husky Harbor Patrolman Wayne Salkoski, himself a dedicated off-duty sport fisherman. “We’re in constant radio contact with the police.”

The problem, as Salkoski sees it, is that a man--or woman or child--can get totally hooked on the alleged sport. The hooker as hookee. “It’s mesmerizing,” he says. “It’s relaxing. The ocean is a big pacifier. Especially under the moon, when they’re biting.”

Under the moon on a Saturday night, the Shark Slayer of North Hollywood pursues his esoteric craft with a single-mindedness that blacks out the green-haired groupies who’ve clustered around him in an attitude approaching awe.

Daniel Farmer his name is, known from Palos Verdes to Zuma, and his habits are ingrained. He catches mackerel in Redondo on one night, then uses them as shark bait the next night, in Santa Monica.

“I don’t eat mackerel myself,” Farmer says. “Too oily. But the sharks love ‘em.”

Farmer hurtles a weighted line far out to sea, then slides slabs of mackerel down the line to the precise spot he’s chosen.

“I’m setting up for a big something ,” he says. “A shark, hopefully. A hundred-pounder. Got two 40s two nights ago. Best eating there is.”

Next to Farmer, Robert Khoury, 14, and Joseph Aitin, 40-ish, unconsciously epitomize the unspoken bond among those who probe the sea for its secrets.

Khoury, who is using a simple, utilitarian pole baited with mussels, hauls in perch, bass, mackerel--many of which he gives away (“if I see somebody needy”). He is a fishing fool, and his bucket overfloweth, but he is sometimes more eager than expert.

Aitin, on the other hand, has the best equipment, and a major-league arm that enables him to fling his bait halfway to Japan. He is after sea bass, but has been known to land truly Brobdingnagian bat rays. He is, by and large, silent, adept, amused.

Khoury gets his line in an unholy tangle. Aitin hauls in his cast and pauses for 10 minutes to help Khoury unravel the mess.

Khoury is Lebanese. Aitin is a former officer in the Israeli army.

Buford (Buff) Dantler, in vain quest for halibut for several hours, decides instead on a fish dinner down the pier. “Wanna use my rig?” he asks the Wimp.

The Wimp eagerly takes over Dantler’s vigil for an hour. He has heard that night fishing is the best.

He catches nothing.

Tyro tip from Bob Konzen: “Night, day, makes no difference. Rain either. Best time for pier fishing is high tide, or just before or especially just after. Sand crabs, all those little goodies the fish love, wash out from the beach. Chow time.”

Tyro tip, from Alan Chartran, environmental specialist for the Water Quality Control Board: Yes, the fish caught from piers are safe to eat, with the exception of white croaker (detailed pictures of which are posted on all piers). DDT, dumped into the bay in the ‘60s and ‘70s, settled on the bottom. Bottom feeders that don’t migrate--croakers--contain a DDT level dangerous to laboratory animals. DDT level itself, though, is receding.

Redondo Beach pier. Open 24 hours; rental poles $6 with $25 deposit and driver’s license; bait $2, everything from squid to shrimp; live bait--anchovies--20 cents apiece, cheaper by the dozen.

Redondo is where it’s at. Besides all the restaurants and shops and buskers and game rooms, you can buy or rent just about anything you’d ever need to corner your quarry. More important-- much more important--the fish virtually leap onto the hooks, as if to die in battle meant instant access to Valhalla.

The rate of catch, and the methods used to insure barbed demise, confirms what the Wimp had long suspected: Fish are dumb. Really dumb.

On one corner of the long, looping boardwalk/pier at Redondo, a dozen Asian friends--Koreans, it turns out--are sweeping the bounding main free of marauding bonitos: two-, four-, six-pounders. Moreover, they are catching fish not with live bait (considered by the cognoscenti the best of possible lures) or even dead bait. They are underhand-casting lines weighted with little sinkers and clear plastic bobbers; reeling in, casting, reeling and casting over and over again until at length there is a plump, silvery dupe thrashing on the business end of the rig.

And dupes they are. When the landed bonito finishes flopping and yields his mouthful to his conqueror, the “bait” turns out to be a mere strip of yellow feather, about three inches long.

The Wimp peers into a sack of fish recently rendered defunct by Chol Pak.

“Some people don’t eat bonito,” the Wimp remarks.

“In my country,” says Pak, “some people don’t eat quiche.”

Everybody-- almost everybody--is reeling ‘em in at Redondo: boys as young as 6, and a surprising, heartening number of girls, liberated at last from a lifetime of jump ropes and Barbie dolls.

Not counting the Wimp, the only man who is not catching fish refuses to give his name--”at least not on a day like this; some of my friends can read.”

Equipped as he is, the man’s lack of luck seems a gross miscarriage. He wears one of those funk-encrusted MacLean Stevenson hats adorned with tie flies, an angler’s jacket with at least 45 secret pockets, and carries a multicompartmented tool-and-tackle box Mr. Goodwrench would kill for. He dips in for an unreasonable facsimile of a herring in pliable aluminum, for a “diamond jig,” for a green-and-yellow “yo-yo,” trying one after the other with egregious lack of success.

Occasionally he casts something else: a dark, furtive glance at the fisherpeople flanking him, all of whom have full buckets. “These people,” he mutters, “don’t know the first thing about fishing. . . .”

Down the pier apiece, a small crowd has gathered around Jillen Johnson, 18, of Culver City, who has just slain a whopping great bonito.

“What’d you use?” someone asks.

“You’re not going to believe this,” says Johnson, “but I hooked him on a French fry.”

The Wimp moves on, to a far more serious boat pier behind Pancho and Wong’s restaurant, where the luck, if anything, is even better.

He catches nothing, but spends a very pleasant hour trying to impale a feisty, slippery live squid on his hook. At length, the squid gives up, and so does he.

And on a Sunday afternoon, just for the heck of it, the Wimp drops by Santa Monica pier to renew new acquaintances. Out of habit, he rents a pole and a plastic bag of frozen squid.

He is chatting with Jerry Sitek, a Santa Monican by way of Alexandria, Egypt, when his line, inexplicably, begins to head for the Channel Islands in a long, slow loop.

“Reel it in!” shouts Sitek.

“Reel what in?”

The line backtracks toward the beach, with somewhat more purpose than previously.

“Reel!” Sitek yells.

The Wimp reels.

From the surface bursts a handsome slender fish, truly a thing of beauty, 13 1/2 inches long, with gleaming white belly and a back of glorious blue and aqua stripes.

Six veterans crowd around the catch. Each knows exactly what it is.

“Wall-eyed perch,” one says.

“It’s a jacksmith,” Sitek says. “That’s what it is, a jacksmith.”

“Small bonito.”

“Nah, it’s a smelt.”

The Wimp decides simply to call the fish Fred.

He cossets Fred in an old sweater and drives him home.

“You bought it,” the Wimp’s incredulous wife says.

“ Caught it!” corrects the Wimp.”

“It put up a terrific fight,” he says, getting into the rhythm of the thing now. “A brave fish, but a clean kill.”

Fred, it should be noted in passing, was absolutely delicious.