The Hero of This Dana Point Fish Story Uses a Gill Net

Every calamity needs a bad guy, but it probably would have been a painful exercise to watch Otto Elliott get basted and sauteed. Much too shy and soft-spoken, Elliott would have made a lousy villain. By all accounts, he’s just too nice a guy. But basted and sauteed Elliott would have been had the rare, 16-foot megamouth shark he snagged last Sunday in the gill net of his fishing boat died or been seriously injured. If it had, Elliott might well be rubbing elbows today with the skipper of the Exxon Valdez as an environmental bogyman.

But the shark survived nicely and so did Elliott, even scoring a few points at a critical time for the commercial fishing industry in Southern California.

The background: Commercial fishers say they are under siege--the targets of an initiative that would bar the kind of gill nets that Elliott was using when he accidentally caught the shark. It’s accidental catches such as Elliott’s that have rallied opposition to the nets, with opponents contending that the nets are “indiscriminate killers” of marine life.

The natural companion of that line of thought is that gill-net fishermen must therefore be, shall we say, less than concerned about the welfare of marine life.

“Uncaring, insensitive bastards is what I had heard,” says Bob Lavenberg, the curator of fishes for the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

So that’s the image Lavenberg had when he headed for Dana Point last week to see what a commercial fisherman named Otto Elliott had ensnared in his net.

By the time Lavenberg got there Monday morning, Elliott had already towed the shark the 7 miles into harbor, tying a neat knot around his tail, then bringing him in at such low speed that the shark was hardly injured, although probably traumatized.

That impressed Lavenberg. It also wasn’t lost on him that Elliott could probably have diced the shark at sea and saved his $5,000 fishing net and the tedious trip back to port. “This was a matter of trust and personal honesty,” Lavenberg said. “He could have cut off the tail or fin or whatever was caught and freed the net. He wouldn’t have had to say anything to anybody, and nobody would have known.”

Late morning Monday at Dana Point Harbor, Lavenberg and Elliott met for the first time. “I told him it was his fish and under his control and in his hands,” said Lavenberg, who was the first to identify the fish and who would coordinate the research on it.

Lavenberg told Elliott he’d like to study the fish, then let it go. “I said there was no sense in killing another of these fish,” Lavenberg said. “Inside of five minutes, Otto came to the same conclusion.”

What Lavenberg found was not only the historic fish--just five megamouths have ever been found or caught, all but this one dead--but a fisherman who had cut his net and towed the shark to shore. Several years ago, when another megamouth had been ensnared in a gill net off Santa Catalina Island, Lavenberg had heard that the fisherman “just wanted it out of his net and wanted to go back to work.”

The meeting between Lavenberg and Elliott could have been ticklish. Lavenberg knows how adamant fishermen are about using the gill nets.

Lavenberg, however, believes that the nets should be phased out slowly over time under auspices of the Fish and Game Department.

He said he has taken a low profile on the proposed initiative and is unhappy that the issue has become so emotional.

“Surely, the nets present a clear and present danger to marine animals in the ocean,” Lavenberg said. “They’re very efficient at catching things. Then what do you do when someone like Otto comes along? That’s an enigma. And that’s not to say that Otto’s the exception. I don’t want to say they’re all bad guys.”

The story had the happiest of endings. The shark lived. Lavenberg was ecstatic with the data collected. The public was treated to perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime sight: a live megamouth.

As for Elliott, the once-anonymous fisherman had made his contribution to science. It may not have paid off like a few days of fishing would have, but he made a friend out of Bob Lavenberg and future ichthyologists he’ll never meet.

He never did get used to the media, however. When one reporter on the scene approached and asked whether he knew which fisherman had caught the shark, Elliott pointed to someone else.

“He doesn’t like to be the center of attention,” said his wife, Catherine. “He was afraid he was going to say the wrong thing.”

Otto, get an agent, babe.

Oh, yes, one other bit of business was left undone in the time Lavenberg and Elliott spent together: The two never discussed the gill-net initiative.