Sardines Make Comeback : Little Fish Are Helping to Provide a Big Season in Southern California

Tuna are being caught by the thousands just south of San Diego.

Yellowtail are being taken consistently in the waters off the southern Channel Islands, and along the coast as far north as Malibu.

Obviously, Southland fishing is going strong.

Favorable oceanic conditions have been a factor, but so has been the steady supply of bait. Notable among the bait fish is the long, almost-lost sardine.

Bait tanks these days are loaded with them.

Take a trip on one of San Diego’s overnight boats. Grab a four- to six-inch sardine and watch it perform like an anchovy on steroids.

It will run from the boat, almost immediately attracting hungry predators in the area. It will remain fresh and healthy until swallowed, although it is considered wise to change baits if there are no takers within a minute or so.

An anchovy is more likely to swim in circles near the boat and be torn from the hook by an attacking fish or the strength of the current. Or it may falter and die after several seconds’ swimming with a hook through its nose or gills.

Anchovies are vital to Southland sportfishing fleets. They’re ideal for such smaller fish as bonito, bass and barracuda, which keep the half-day operations in business. And they’re the perfect chum, since they scale easily and remain close enough to the boat to keep the fish in the area.

But for bigger game, the sardine is the better bait.

“If we had pin-head bait (small anchovies) this time of year we’d be struggling,” said Joe Chait, who owns and operates the Conquest, which runs out of San Diego’s Fisherman’s Landing. “We have these nice sardines, the fish love ‘em and they’re accessible for us.”

The entire San Diego fleet is supplied by the Everingham Bros. Bait Co., which this season has kept the fleet in constant supply.

“If we ask for something, they try and produce it,” Chait says.

And the company, with its fleet of seiners, bait carriers and airplanes, has been producing sardines--especially since this has been an extremely poor year for anchovies.

“It seems that whenever the conditions appeal to the sardines, it doesn’t appeal to the anchovies so much, and anchovies kind of melt away and then the sardines become more abundant,” Roy Everingham said. “One thing about this year, that I haven’t seen in all my (40) years in this business, is the abundance of these little sardines, these four- to six-inchers.”

Nor have fishermen up and down the coast.

They’re seeing these “racehorse sardines” in the surf and beyond. Many believe they are attracting larger fish closer to shore.

A possible example is the 36-pound white seabass caught in the surf last month off Zuma Beach by North Hollywood’s Jim Russo, who was fishing with a light-tackle rod, using a sand crab for bait.

“People are jigging (sardines) on the pier,” said Phil Campanella, owner of the tackle store at the end of Malibu Pier. “It’s rare that we even see sardines.”

Campanella has been involved in the fishing industry for 20 years and says sardines this year have been unusually abundant in Santa Monica Bay.

“It was always rare to get a load of sardines to fish with,” he said. “This is the first year we’ve had that.”

Charlie Davis of Huntington Beach recalls the late 1930s and ‘40s, when sportfishing landings had trouble catching anchovies because sardines were crowding them out.

“When the harbor had all the effluent from the canneries, and sewage that came into San Pedro and Long Beach harbors, the sardines came into feed on it and they were so thick that you couldn’t get anchovies,” he said.

The cannery business was thriving at the time. There were 20-25 canneries in the San Pedro area alone and the fishery stretched from Ensenada to San Francisco.

Sardines were in heavy demand on all fronts.

Commercial catches exceeded three-quarters of a million tons annually in the late 1930s. Catching, canning and selling sardines couldn’t have been easier.

But things changed in the 1940s. Overfishing was believed the major cause of the collapse of the fishery in 1947.

Canneries struggled unsuccessfully to stay open. Most were vacated or converted to waterfront restaurants in the years after the collapse. The market remained, however, and the Pacific stock was fished into near oblivion.

Norway and Spain became the main suppliers of canned sardines.

The California Department of Fish and Game finally imposed a moratorium in 1972, which was to remain in place until it was determined that there were at least 20,000 metric tons in the Pacific stock.

“I’ve given the opinion that the whole (Pacific) stock was less than 2,000 tons in 1975, but you gotta remember, we don’t have any good way to measure such a small stock,” said Paul Smith of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The ban on sardines led to a slow recovery, in part because the Mexican government would not--and still doesn’t--impose restrictions on the take of sardines or anchovies.

Still, the determination was made in 1986 that there were 20,000 metric tons in the stock and California’s commercial fleet--operating primarily out of San Pedro--was permitted 1,000 tons a year, starting January 1.

It reached the 1,000-ton quota in July of 1986 and in April of 1987. This year, the fleet caught its 1,000-ton limit in the first three days of January, prompting commercial fishermen to pressure the state for an increased fishery.

“I’ve seen the fall of (the fishery in the 1940s), and from what these boats are telling us, there’s more sardines now than there ever was before,” said Frank Iacono, 69, vice president of United Food Processors in Terminal Island and a consultant for the Fisherman’s Co-Op, a group of purse seine fishermen.

“We’d like to see (the fishery) opened. There’s a good market for (sardines). We’ve had a lot of inquiries from overseas. They want to know if they can buy sardines and we don’t have any.”

Since the 1,000-ton quota has already been met, commercial fishermen are allowed an incidental take of up to 35% sardines, most of which is hauled in with mackerel catches.

“We’ve had several boats that have been cited with over 50% (sardines),” Iacono said. “The fishermen have to make split decisions. When you bring alongside 1,000 tons of fish or so, you better damn know real fast what the mixture is.”

Patty Wolf, a biologist with the DFG who specializes in sardine research, said she hasn’t heard of or seen many loads of fish carrying more than 20% sardines, and that although the sardine stock appears on the road to recovery, the DFG wants to make sure it doesn’t take a turn for the worse.

“From 1975 to 1990, they’ve been increasing,” she said. “We think it’s over 20,000 (tons).”

But she also said the DFG lacks the money to adequately sample the stock, and reopening the fishery now might be detrimental to the sardine’s recovery.

“We need to go farther north, south and offshore. . . . We need more ship time,” she said.

Iacono acknowledged the state’s money problems, but criticized the state’s refusal to increase the quota.

“The DFG cannot agree with us because they’re not going to stick their necks out,” he said. “But they know damned well what’s out there. And I think if they gave us a 10,000- to 15,000-ton quota it wouldn’t hurt the resource whatsoever.”

Wolf’s reply: “That’s his opinion. It’s difficult to get enough information . . . that allows us to know that we have the right number (of sardines in the stock). Our major responsibility is to rehabilitate that resource.”