Catch-22 : Must a Thriving San Diego Fishing Community Die So More Pacific Dolphin May Live?

Like his grandfather, who came here from Madeira, Robert Virissimo is a tuna fisherman. Dropping out of school at 16, he went to sea on his father’s boat. Now 37, he is a boat owner, enjoying the material rewards of years of hard work and the luxury of time at home with his wife and three daughters.

His story is typical in the Portugese-American community, which for generations has been the heart of the U.S. tuna fleet. Sprawling homes atop Point Loma are monuments to their success. Portugese Hall and St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church in Point Loma are ties to the mother country.

Virissimo, though, is an American and proud of it. But now he is angry and bewildered by the April 12 action by the three canners that supply 75% of the domestic tuna. Prodded by environmentalists, StarKist, Chicken of the Sea and Bumble Bee have vowed to buy only “dolphin-safe” tuna.

As Virissimo and others in the U.S. fleet see it, this is an invitation to foreign boats to wipe out the domestic tuna industry. Unlike Americans, foreigners are not subject to 100% government monitoring of dolphin kills; some countries have no monitoring.

“You think those tuna are going to die of old age?” Virissimo asks bitterly.

His wife, Odette, who also comes from a Portugese-American fishing family, sees the U.S. fleet as a victim of “the Flipper syndrome.” Everyone loves a dolphin.

“It’s almost embarrassing” to be a fisherman in today’s climate, Robert Virissimo says. He describes a recent scene outside the American Tunaboat Assn. offices in San Diego with demonstrators shouting, “Murderers!”

Environmentalists want no more dolphins killed or maimed in the giant nets (purse seines) in which fishermen trap herds of the mammals along with schools of tuna. The dolphin-tuna bond is a little-understood symbiosis unique to the Eastern Tropical Pacific, where U.S. fishermen take about 46% of their total catch.

Environmentalists say they fear dolphins may become extinct. They appeal to consumers’ consciences and hearts, depicting the mammals as gentle, intelligent, helpful to humans.

But U.S. fishermen see themselves as victims of an environmental war that they have helped fight through efforts to reduce dolphin mortality, they say.

Others take a broad view. The domestic fleet may take a beating for a time, they say, but the dolphins’ survival--and ultimately the survival of all species--demands that Americans show the way in achieving zero-kill.

Why us, U.S. fishermen ask, pointing to slaughters by, among others, the Japanese, who have declined to follow StarKist’s lead. The Americans point to their voluntary financing of dolphin conservation research.

And they tell how their men have been killed by sharks while trying to manually free dolphins from nets.

In 1980, Jerry Correia, 22, of San Diego, was mauled by a shark and bled to death in the arms of his father, Joseph, who, as captain of the Calypso, had sent his son into the net. Correia’s mother said bitterly that her son died “for a regulation that says a porpoise is more important than a man.”

The Portugese-American community set up a trust fund for the son born to Correia’s widow, Delia. It is a community that takes care of its own.

Tuna is big business. Each year, Americans consume 42 million cases (48 cans to a case), about 30% of the world total. To meet demand, StarKist, with 38% of the domestic market, buys about 250,000 tons annually, 45% of it from U.S.-flagged vessels.

August Felando, president of the American Tunaboat Assn., estimates that 20,000 to 30,000 tons--only 12% to 15% of the total U.S. catch, goes to export markets.

The Eastern Tropical Pacific, a triangle stretching from the coast of Washington, south to central coast of South America and west toward Hawaii, abounds with yellow fin and skipjack, the primary tuna for canning. But in these waters, dolphins and tuna travel together, dolphins on the surface.

Fishermen use dolphins to lead them to tuna. Since 1960, they have employed a “backdown” procedure that allows the net’s cork line to dip and the dolphins to swim free. As a result of this and other conservation efforts, industry spokesmen say, dolphin kills by U.S. fishermen have been cut in half in recent years. In 1989, there were fewer than 13,000 a year, the National Marine Fisheries reports.

The estimate for the total number of dolphins killed as a result of commercial fishing worldwide last year is 100,000.

The canners’ new embargo will “only remove the people who are the least threat to the porpoise,” says Felando, who argues the decision by H.J. Heinz, parent company of StarKist, was a hollow victory for misinformed environmentalists. The U.S. fleet, he points out, more than complies with the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which mandates a maximum annual dolphin kill of 20,000.

Every U.S.-flagged boat carries an observer from the National Marine Fisheries, an arm of the U.S. Commerce Department. But, Felando emphasizes, only one-third of foreign boats in the Eastern Tropical Pacific carry observers.

In effect, he says, the canners’ actions have “removed us from our traditional fishing grounds. We can’t market our fish in the U.S., and export possibilities are very, very limited.”

There will be no solution, he adds, until all governments agree to stop killing dolphins. Meanwhile, he says, dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific “aren’t faced with extinction, even close to it.”

Why, he asks, shouldn’t dolphins be managed like deer? Millions of “Bambis” are killed by cars, he points out, but there is no comparable uproar.

Fishermen, most of whom have per-trip contracts with canneries, were taken “by complete surprise” by the Heinz directive, Felando says. Days before, 28 San Diego boats had headed for the fishing waters.

The 65 U.S. tuna boats are the remnants of a fleet that numbered 249 in 1955; all but 16--those out of San Pedro--are owned and managed by San Diegans. The boats fish year-round, returning only for repairs, provisions and unloading.

It is a fleet that has survived economic challenges from the Japanese, boat seizures for alleged violations of South American 200-mile sovereignty lines, tariff-free imports of the water-packed tuna now in high demand, and competition from Asian fleets using cheap labor.

But dolphins are an emotional issue. Fishing people are infuriated by environmentalists’ effective use of a surreptitiously shot film that shows squealing dolphins being ground up in a boat’s gears. They point out it was taken on a Panamanian boat that had no observer.

There has been confusion, too, about StarKist’s mandate. It does not require fishermen to revert to pole fishing, which was abandoned in the ‘50s, or to convert to long-line fishing, a multihook method used to catch albacore, which rarely school. Labor costs would be “just prohibitive,” says Erik Bloemendaal, spokesman at StarKist in Long Beach.

But StarKist wants fishermen to stop using dolphin to locate tuna and to stop setting their nets atop dolphin herds.

Of boats that left port before the embargo, if they return with fish that are not dolphin-safe, he says, “We have to deal with that”--possibly, StarKist will buy that fish.

Felando, a fisherman’s son who went to sea as a teen-ager, later earning a law degree, says hereafter the U.S. fleet will have no option but to fish more distant, overcrowded oceans. And, while it now provides 97% of the tuna for U.S. canners, it may be forced to sell cheaply to foreigners who don’t care about dolphins.

Meanwhile, he adds, foreigners will continue unregulated fishing “on porpoise”--using dolphins as spotters and netting them with the tuna. The Americans will be left to catch juvenile fish that do not swim with dolphins, thus possibly depleting future tuna populations.

“People may laugh at us,” he says, “but we are the porpoises’ best friend.”

San Diego and tuna fishing have been joined for decades. In a ‘50s musical revue at the Old Globe Theatre, a group from “up North” complained of San Diego, “The smell of your tuna / Goes clear to Laguna / and ruins our annual ball. . . . “

But the industry started in San Pedro. A fish broker faced with a sardine shortage experimented by packing 700 cases of albacore, then considered a nuisance fish. In 1903, one case went to the shelves of a Los Angeles grocer; two years later, some of it was still there.

By 1919, there were 10 tuna canneries in San Diego. (None remain.) As demand for tuna grew, canners bought boats and sold them to the fishermen, taking a share of the catch in lieu of mortgage payments.

From the start, Portugese-Americans, who had settled on Point Loma since the late 1870s, were the nucleus of the industry, which includes a number of Italian-Americans. The sixth-generation of some immigrant families still lives there. Each generation has left its mark on the community.

Great-great-grandfathers of some of the men who go to sea today marched in a parade in 1892 in celebration of the discovery of San Diego in 1592 by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portugese sailing for the crown of Spain.

Some fishermen’s houses are easily identifiable, with their concrete or gravel “lawns,” fishermen’s wives’ way of coping with gardening during their husbands’ long absences.

St. Agnes Church has seen hundreds of marriages linking families of Portugese-Americans. Portugese Hall is the site each year of a dinner for 5,000 climaxing the Festa do Espiritu Santo, which honors a 16th-Century Portugese Queen, St. Isabel, canonized for aiding the poor.

The festival, scheduled this year for June 3, brings together boat owners, captains, crew, canners. But this festival, the 80th, may be “very, very sad,” Odette Virissimo says.

There are bad feelings between fishermen and canners.

Those who have already felt the impact of the StarKist-led embargo include festival presidents Joseph and Marilyn Silveira. He is captain of the 170-foot Marietta, which sits idle in San Diego Harbor. The ship was to leave four days after the StarKist announcement but stayed in port, he says, because “we have no outlet to sell our fish.” The owner is exploring options for his boat and, Silveira says, “the crew is just trying to see if something is going to come up . . .”

Ordinarily, the Marietta makes four or five trips a year of seven to 11 weeks each, always in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. He says of the embargo, “I personally am sick about it. Nobody’s ever helped us” in efforts to reduce dolphin mortality.

Silveira, 48, went to sea at 16, a third-generation fisherman; his son, Joe, 19, crews on the Marietta.

It will be festa as usual this year, hopes Silveira, the Marietta’s captain for seven years. “We’re going to hold our heads up and get through it one way or another. . . .”

Claire Alves, historian of the Portugese Historical Center, discusses the plight of the fleet and tears brim in her eyes. She is not Portugese, but her husband, Jose, 45, is an immigrant. San Diego’s Portugese-American community is disappearing, she says, “and I’ll cry when it’s gone.”

Already, younger fishing families such as Janet and Emmanuel Ferreira, 32, have moved to suburbia, some forced out by sky-high Point Loma real estate. The community is scattering.

Alves is passionate in her defense of the fishermen: “Everybody loves animals, including the men who work with them. These men are not killers. They believe in God.”

Fishing people speak of years of hard work, of women coping with births and deaths while their men were at sea.

Virginia Correia, 60, wife of a retired fisherman, recalls her Portugese-American parents working at the old High Seas Cannery on Addison Street. Like most wives of her generation, she did not work outside the home; women’s work was to rear the kids and keep things running while the men were gone, up to 48 weeks a year. Today, wives of young crewmen work outside their homes because they must.

Mary Freitas, Marilyn Silveira’s mother, was born in Madeira and came with her family to San Diego when she was 11. She has five sons and five daughters; all of her sons are in “the industry.” Both her father and her late husband were boat captains. “It’s always been a wonderful occupation,” she says, but now. . . .

Freitas, 60, says her younger grandchildren “come home and say, ‘Our Daddy kills the porpoises.’ It hurts. One of my grandsons goes in the nets and saves those porpoises.”

She looks back and says, “It was a hard life, but a good life. We struggled many a time, but we always managed--with family, friends.”

Janet Ferreira, 28, wonders what will happen to her husband if the domestic tuna industry collapses. He has fished since he was 18. His dream was to leave the boats at 35--this is a young man’s game. He has no college; he has no land skills. She has no career; to be with their two young sons, she offers paid child care at home.

The Americans, she says, are “getting back-stabbed by their own country. And then people go out and buy Japanese cars while the Japanese are killing the porpoises.”

Environmentalists suggest that dolphins are threatened by extinction and blame the fishermen.

Some species have dwindled, but, says Roddy Moscoso of the National Marine Fisheries Service, “We wouldn’t support any statement that these dolphin are threatened with extinction.” Still, he adds, “We are concerned about the populations,” whose numbers are not known.

He believes zero-kill is “not unrealistic” but says the effect of the embargo “remains to be seen,” noting that purse seining on dolphin accounts for only 8% of the world’s tuna catch. Most tuna is caught by purse seining without dolphin and on long lines.

But, he says, “We’re very optimistic. We like to think the conservation ethic of the United States will transfer to other nations. . . . We now have taken the lead on this one.”

If consumers are confused about “dolphin-safe” tuna, many are also confused about the words dolphin and porpoise; the animals come from different families but many fisherman use porpoise to distinguish from the dolphin fish. “Flipper” is an Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin, the kind seen in marine parks. They are coastal mammals. Spotters and spinners, the ones that get snarled in fishing nets, are dolphins found in open seas. All “are known to interact with humans,” says Thomas Lewis, a marine biologist with the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

Fishermen tend to dismiss reports of dolphins as animals of extraordinary character who all but converse with humans. But Lewis observes, “If I were caught in a net, I’d be focusing my attention on trying to get out of there, not on talking to the person who caught me.”

In the late ‘60s, when the dolphin-tuna problem was first observed, Lewis says, up to 500,000 dolphins died in nets each year; thus, 6 million to 8 million of the animals, which biologists note have a low reproduction rate, may have perished.

To reach zero-kill, he suggests, fishermen may have to find ways to break the tuna-dolphin bond. He mentions research into placing large floating platforms in the ocean to see if tuna will swim beneath them.

Felando dismisses the idea that there are viable alternatives to fishing amid dolphin. Tuna rarely swim without porpoises, he says, adding that for fishermen, “It’s hard work out there and you take it as it comes.”

He emphasizes the steady decline in dolphin kills, saying 99% of the 600 or so animals swept into the net during any one set are freed.

Robert Sulnick, executive director of Santa Monica-based American Oceans Campaign, emphasizes that “dolphin-safe” must become a worldwide movement, with the U.S. in the lead: “The industry’s going to have to have a government subsidy so (fishermen) don’t have to lose their homes, go out of business.” To him, it is “unacceptable” to think in terms of “losing the dolphins to save the fishermen or the fishermen to save the dolphins.”

He adds, “I think our tuna fishermen should be leading the charge here,” first by lobbying the Japanese to stop killing dolphins.

Robert Virissimo, one of four brothers who fish, says, “Everybody loves a dolphin. So do we. We need them more than anybody.” But, he observes bitterly, people get killed by cars daily and “I don’t see everybody walking.”

What’s to become of experienced crewmen with $40,000 to $50,000 annual incomes? he asks. Will they become gardeners, house painters?

“I’ve never been so confused,” he adds. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got payments that come around every three months” on the Odette Therese, a $250,000-plus annual tax bill, insurance and a $100,000 fuel bill. “The environmentalists are going to break me.”

His boat takes 5,000 tons of tuna a year--$1 million worth. Today, a big seiner can cost $14 million and, he says, “You have to catch that much to make it.”

He expects to see the Japanese “come knocking at our doors--’Hey, guys, no pressure from environmentalists.’ ”

Odette Virissimo glances around her glass-walled contemporary home--4,500 square feet, with pool-- and says, “Obviously, we’ve done very well. Fishing was very lucrative, we won’t deny that.” But “We don’t want to lose it all.”

The Virissimos are considering moving to Portugal. Things would have come full cycle, as their grandparents came here from Portugal seeking a better life.

Robert Virissimo made his money the hard way, starting in 1974 when he fished for six weeks aboard a boat off West Africa for $900. Now they wonder how long they will be able to meet payments on home and boat. After 18 years of marriage--he is 37, she is 36--they see themselves starting over. If they do move to Portugal, he says, “I’d probably reflag my boat. I’d save a lot of money in taxes. And I wouldn’t have anybody on my back.”

They think they are seeing the end of a dynasty--of Portugese-Americans who went to sea, son following son. “Maybe,” she muses, “that’s why God didn’t give us a son.”

Cristiano Da Silva, 64, and his wife, Evelina, represent an earlier generation that found the American dream. They settled on Point Loma in the mid-’50s as newlyweds from the Azores. “I brought 40 bucks with me,” he recalls.

His first job here was crewing on a boat, $200 for six months’ work. She worked for 12 years as a hand-sewer in a clothing factory, earning about $30 a week.

Today, they live in a palatial Point Loma home with a panoramic view of bay and city. Sitting in his living room, Cristiano Da Rosa, weathered and tanned, is an incongruous figure, shoe-less, perched on a delicate white brocade period chair, surrounded by gilt and crystal. “We have good things,” he says, “but we suffered a full lifetime for it. . . . We live with the fish, and nothing else.”

In 1974, he bought the Evelyn Da Rosa, a 220-foot seiner, of which his son, Larry, is captain. Two years ago, Da Rosa stopped going to sea. He’s not yet ready to sell his boat. But where will she go to fish? “I have guys who have worked for me for 18 years,” he says. “There will be a few more boys collecting unemployment.”

He was “ready to sell all my belongings and go back where I came from,” he says, “but my family doesn’t like the idea.” They wonder if they will be able to keep this house.

Their daughter Evelyn, also a fisherman’s wife, says her husband, Michael Feliciano, will stay in fishing--”It’s the only business he knows.” She looks around her parents’ new house, with its terraces and pool, and says, “It’s sad. They worked their whole life for this.”

Joshua Feliciano, Evelyn’s 16-month old son, is on Da Rosa’s lap now, exploring his grandfather’s dark eyebrows. He hugs the child and says sadly, “There’s not going to be a boat for him.”