Bucking the Tide : 200-Year-Old Law Makes Life Hard for Immigrant Fishermen From Vietnam

Three miles offshore from Newport Beach, Ha Tan Bang stood on the rolling deck of the Saint Ann as a few purple, foot-long sea creatures known as slime eels slithered past.

The Vietnam-born fisherman has been scouring the ocean muck for the last nine months in search of this hideous-looking eel--a creature most fishermen disdain. Even Ha was shocked the first time he saw one and thought: “Do I really want to do this?”

As a big one slid along the deck after falling out of a trap, he grabbed the eel and tossed it into a 100-gallon barrel.

“The white people, they don’t want to do this,” he said in halting English. “If I had the money, I’d quit. This ocean . . . it’s hard to make money.”

In the coastal waters of Southern California, Ha and a small band of Vietnamese fishermen have carved a precarious living from the sea.

From a single vessel in 1981, the Los Angeles group has grown to about 15 boats and 50 fishermen based on a dreary dock at Fish Harbor on the eastern end of Terminal Island. The group is the second-largest Vietnamese fleet on the West Coast after Monterey Bay’s, according to the Vietnamese Fishermen Assn. of America, a 200-member advocacy group based in Oakland.

Their lives revolve around the shifting tides of the rock cod, kingfish and now the slime eel markets.

But they face a host of problems from an outside world they see as strange, irrational and sometimes cruel.

Since the first appearance of the Vietnamese fishermen, they have labored under the threat of a 200-year-old federal law prohibiting non-citizens from operating large commercial fishing vessels.

The law has resulted in fines and the threatened confiscation of some boats, forcing many Vietnamese to resort to hiring what they call “paper captains,” usually Anglo deckhands who are paid to sit and pretend to be the masters of the boat.

Vietnamese fishermen filed suit in San Francisco against the U.S. Coast Guard, claiming that the law is discriminatory. On Tuesday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily stopped enforcement of the law while it hears arguments over its constitutionality.

The growth of the fleet has also spawned sporadic resentment in the tight-knit community of Fish Harbor.

Some fishermen complain that the Vietnamese routinely break the law by harvesting undersize fish and using gill nets in prohibited areas--allegations the Vietnamese deny.

There is also a brooding intolerance of the Vietnamese, whom many fishermen see as impenetrably strange, intrusive and foreign.

Dan Whitfield, a fisherman who docks just a few yards away from the Vietnamese, stood on the deck of his boat with his hands on his hips one recent afternoon and complained that the Vietnamese pollute the dock with fish guts, play loud music that sounds like banging kitchen pans and make a mess in the nearby public toilets. They added that the Vietnamese’s dried fish are a public health hazard.

“They dry them until they look like potato chips with flies you can’t believe,” Whitfield said, shaking his head in disgust. “It’s a basic mentality of ‘Screw you.’ They have their own rules.”

Ha shrugs at such complaints, saying he hears them all the time and knows there’s little he can do to stop them.

It is a little after 3:30 a.m. when the day begins at Fish Harbor with the first sound of diesel engines growling from the Vietnamese side of the docks.

Armed with jumbo cups of coffee and a few packs of English cigarettes, Ha and a friend trundle down the dock toward the Saint Ann.

“Nice day,” Ha says, taking a quick look at the water around him. “Very flat.”

At 28, Ha is a wiry man with a brushy mustache whom the fishermen have nicknamed “Hung,” a Vietnamese word for courageous. He lives by himself in an apartment in Westminster in Orange County, crammed with homemade slime eel traps.

Ha has been commuting to Fish Harbor since 1981 and is one of the most experienced Vietnamese fishermen there.

The other fishermen come from throughout Vietnam, and the names of their hometowns are painted on boats scattered around the dock: An Hoa, Cam Ranh, Nha Trang, Kien Giang.

Like most of the others, Ha fled Vietnam after the Communist takeover by going fishing one day and never returning. Thai pirates robbed him twice en route to Thailand, and he spent 19 months in a refugee camp there before arriving in the United States in 1979.

At first, he worked as a janitor and a lathe operator but he jumped at the chance when a friend invited him to go fishing.

He started by gill-netting for rock cod, kingfish and whatever else he could find until the unexpected birth of a market for slime eels, a slippery, sharp-toothed creature that exists on the very fringes of California’s multimillion-dollar fishing industry.

No one in these waters had ever bothered trapping the creature until late last year, when Korean buyers began showing up in California offering money for the eels, the skin of which is used in Korea to make wallets, shoes and handbags.

In Southern California, only Vietnamese fishermen trap the eels, said Barbara Diem, one of the buyers at Fish Harbor. “I’ve tried Americans before, but for them, it’s a lot of work for not much money,” she said. “These guys (Vietnamese) are smart and they work hard.”

So far, about half the Vietnamese boats have switched over to slime eels. The fishermen go out six or seven days a week for at least 12 hours a day. At best, they get 40 cents a pound for the eels, and Ha figures that if he is lucky, he will make $12,000 to $15,000 this year.

“Not much money, “ Ha said, “but it’s not too dangerous.”

Contending with the sea and the vagaries of the slime eel market, however, is sometimes the least of the Vietnamese fishermen’s worries.

Three years ago, Ha was fined $2,000 for violating the federal law that prohibits non-citizens from operating U.S. commercial vessels.

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Ross Wheatley, an assistant district legal officer in Long Beach, said the law was enacted in 1789 as a way of ensuring an ample supply of ships in time of war and of preserving the integrity of the U.S. fishing fleet. It applies to the largest supertanker down to fishing boats of about 30 feet in length, he added.

For years, the Vietnamese fishermen have skirted the law by hiring paper captains to pretend they are the masters of the boat. They are usually paid $200 a week to sit on board and read magazines.

“Most of the Vietnamese boats are like that,” said Jeff Nghien of San Jose as he sat in the captain’s chair of the Kien Giang 9 one recent day. After talking for a few minutes, Nghien, a U.S. citizen, admitted that he was, in fact, the paper captain of the Kien Giang 9. The real owner was outside on the deck nonchalantly tying up the boat.

The ploy, which is well known to the Coast Guard, doesn’t always work.

In Ha’s case, the paper captain he hired panicked as the Coast Guard boarded the Saint Ann and he pointed out Ha as the real captain.

No problem. Ha went out the next day and hired a new paper captain.

The life of a paper captain is no joy ride.

David Blansett, an Anglo deckhand at Fish Harbor, said he has worked as one several times, although he swears he will never do it again.

Earlier this year, he went out on a boat from Ventura and after a few days at sea ran into a “major storm.” A discussion of whether the boat should go back turned into a fistfight between Blansett and the rest of the crew, he said.

Blansett, a hulking man who towers over the Vietnamese, said he won the argument and the ship returned to harbor.

“They’ll fish in all sorts of bad conditions,” he said. “I tested myself to see if I could do it, and it didn’t work.”

The determination of the Vietnamese fishermen to go out in all kinds of weather and in some of the most infirm vessels around is legendary at Fish Harbor.

Before slime eels, the mainstay of the Vietnamese fleet was rock cod, which required traveling at least 70 or 80 miles out to sea and staying a week or more regardless of storms or cold weather.

Other fishermen also made this trip, but the Vietnamese made it in what even they conceded were some of the most decrepit boats on the water.

“They’re daring,” said one Anglo fisherman. “I wouldn’t go out in those boats.”

Ha owns the only steel-hulled Vietnamese boat, built with the help of a $30,000 interest-free loan from a local seafood wholesaler. The others are made of wood.

At least two of the wooden boats have sunk at sea. Just a few months ago, the Nha Trang sank while tied up to the dock. “The American boats have everything,” Ha said. “We have nothing.”

Over the last eight years, two Vietnamese fishermen have suffocated at sea after leaving a gasoline generator running at night in the cabin as they slept.

“All of them were good friends,” said Ha, who found the bodies the next morning.

The rise of the slime eel market has come as a welcome respite for the Vietnamese fishermen, since the traps are placed only a few miles offshore.

But those who cannot find work trapping slime eels must continue gill-netting for rock cod, kingfish and halibut. It is in this arena that they have drawn the most complaints from other fishermen.

In Texas, angry local shrimpers burned several Vietnamese vessels eights years ago. A mock boat labeled “Viet Cong” was burned during a Ku Klux Klan rally in Houston the same year.

In Los Angeles also, tensions have smoldered.

The dispute is rooted in the complex California Department of Fish and Game regulations on gill-netting. The regulations restrict the water depth, net size, species, fish length and time of year the nets can be used to ensure a future supply of fish for sport and commercial fishermen.

Many fishermen say the Vietnamese routinely break the gill-net rules to bring in bigger catches.

“They claim they don’t know the law but they do,” said Butch Meyer, captain of the Americo, docked at Fish Harbor. “They’ve wiped out every damn little fish around.”

“They take anything on their boats,” Blansett said. “We’re not picking on the Vietnamese; they’re picking on us.”

The Vietnamese fishermen say they do not fully understand the regulations, which they see as sometimes irrational and confusing.

“Even if I want to give someone a fish to eat, I have to fill out a form,” said Ha, who has been fined twice for gill-netting violations.

Ha said that, because of the fines, few Vietnamese intentionally break the rules. “At first, we had big problems,” he said. “We thought it was like Vietnam. You just go out in the sea. The fishing is free.”

But Fish and Game Capt. Gene Martin is skeptical. He said the department’s regulation book is printed in only one foreign language: Vietnamese.

“We have a higher percentage of violations with Southeast Asians,” he said. “This is a money-making operation. When there’s money to be made, people are willing to take chances.”

The chances of violating the gill-netting regulations has been reduced since the Vietnamese switched to trapping slime eels, a virtually unregulated market.

But no one is sure how much longer the trade will last.

Most of the fishermen believe their generation will be the first and last at Fish Harbor, since none of them want their children to even think about following in their footsteps.

“You have to go far from home,” said Duong Van Ngan, who came down from Ventura with the Eclipse a few months ago to search for slime eels. “The children have school and everything else. There is enough for them to learn.”

Ha also is thinking of getting out of the business and, in fact, has put his boat up for sale, although he doubts that anyone will buy it.

In the meantime, Ha has already started thinking about his next move.

“Snails,” he said, describing the three-inch-round sea snails that Americans call periwinkles. “They will take 1,000 pounds a day, 45 cents a pound.”

In a few weeks, he figures, he’ll give it a try.