‘Floating Cops’ Lend Security to Life on Delta

The disheveled, scraggly bearded river rat wearing an old wool turtleneck sweater and tattered trousers, his glasses glued together and encrusted with dirt, waved from the end of his pier to the “floating cops.”

San Joaquin County Deputy Sheriff Barry Oaks, 38, and his partner, John Pike, 45, returned the wave and headed their 22-foot boat for the rickety wharf protruding from a clump of bare willow trees.

John Gordon, 79, lives with his sister, Bertie Smith, 69, on McDonald Island in an old shack embraced by the willows. The officers stopped to visit with Gordon, as Pike noted, “to see if all was well in his neck of the woods.”

Oaks and Pike are among seven full-time, year-round San Joaquin County deputies assigned to patrol the islands and waterways of the Sacramento River Delta for the Sheriff Department’s five-vessel Marine Services Division. In winter there are 3,000 boats on the 300 miles of water they patrol. In summer the number of occupied boats in the delta jumps to as high as 8,000, and other deputies augment the Delta Patrol.

Four other counties have delta patrols--Sacramento, Yolo, Contra Costa and Solano--but the San Joaquin County sheriff’s unit is the largest.

Among other duties, the deputies protect the barge, boat and riverside residents who call themselves river rats. Among the river rats living on the scores of tiny islands in the delta are squatters, renters, homeowners and boat owners.

“I’ve lived the better part of my life in the delta. I like it out here. Nobody bothers me. It’s isolated, far away from traffic and crowds. I go fishing when I want . . . “ mused Gordon, a construction worker and farmer before becoming a river rat.

The two deputies finished their visit with Gordon and then moved up the San Joaquin River.

“We’re involved with everything going on in the delta,” Pike said. “Many of the islands are inaccessible except by boat. We’re like the Coast Guard. We work boating accidents, drownings, check boats for proper registration, proper equipment aboard, life jackets, fire extinguishers, etc. We arrest boat operators for drunk driving.

“We fill in for (the Department of) Fish and Game, making sure people fishing have licenses and don’t exceed the catch limit. We check for illegal hunting. We’re firemen. We put out boat fires. It’s never dull on the Delta Patrol.”

The deputies tow disabled boats to marinas, and they recover stolen boats. The delta is a dumping ground for Bay-Area murder victims, and deputies from time to time fish bodies out of the rivers and sloughs with draglines.

Oaks told about a recent $1-million marijuana bust. “We discovered a field of marijuana plants hidden by a levee and growing on one of the islands. We kept it under surveillance until the three marijuana farmers showed up and we arrested them.”

A huge freighter flying the flag of Liberia sailed by in the Stockton Deep Water Channel, dwarfing the sheriff’s patrol boat. Not long ago a sailor from one of the oceangoing ships had a stroke and was lowered over the side to the sheriff’s boat for transfer to a hospital.

The patrol boat went by dozens of islands: Devil’s, Bacon, Lower and Upper Jones, King, Mandeville, Union, Venice, Lost Isle (big enough only for a saloon and boat docks for its patrons) and Staten--yes, Staten Island, Calif. The islands are dotted with duck-hunting clubs, fancy yacht clubs and hundreds of weather-beaten boats languishing in back sloughs. Many boast farms with crops like corn, asparagus, safflower and sunflowers.

The boat patrolled Middle, Old River, Calaveras, San Joaquin and Mokelumne rivers, and sloughs with names like Whiskey, Disappointment, Fourteen-Mile and Trapper.

Sea lions frolicked in the water beside the patrol boat. Swans, ducks and coots floated lazily by.

“These guys working the Delta Patrol take care of all of our problems. They’re our guardian angels,” said Roger (Doc) Brown, 45, who with Pat (Hamburger Patty) Ismaili, 45, runs Herman and Helen’s Floating Cafe tied up at Empire Island.

“Nothing goes on that they don’t know about,” Ismaili said.