Sons of the Sea : Legacy of Sharks, Oars and Ones That Didn’t Get Away

Stan Lewis quit his job picking watermelons in the Imperial Valley and hitchhiked to Solana Beach in the summer of 1933.

Walking over a sandy rise, the 18-year-old saw a man rowing a small, wooden fishing boat to shore. The boat sat low in the water, indicating a good catch. Lewis remembered that moment vividly--right down to the transparent clarity of the Pacific Ocean--until his death 46 years later.

He remembered it as the moment he decided how to spend the rest of his life.

The decision lives on today in his son, Tommy Lewis, 44, who still fishes the coast of North County in a small wooden boat.

Nearly every day, from early October to early March, Lewis’ purple fishing boat can be seen from shore near the kelp beds between Solana Beach and Leucadia. The rest of the year he fishes in deeper water.

Like his father and his grandfather, he pulls lobster and halibut from the ocean and sees his catch sold in local restaurants and fish markets. Often, only hours after it is taken from the ocean, it is on the tables of North County.

There aren’t many fishermen like Lewis left: the work is difficult, the money unpredictable, the catches shrinking, the legal restrictions increasing. “There used to be a lot more of us in the area, but a lot of them have died or quit. Each year, six or seven new guys try fishing, but they usually quit by the end of the year,” Lewis said. “Fishing isn’t easy.”

It is an industry in which storms can destroy equipment, poachers can steal the catch and death by drowning is an ever-present danger. But, for Lewis, those things pale in comparison to the blow dealt last fall when California voters approved the Marine Resources Protection Act, which will ban gill net fishing within the 3-mile coastal zone by the end of 1993.

There are hopes among local gill net fishermen that the new law will be repealed or modified. For now, however, there are a few men hanging onto an ancient craft, and a way of life that may soon be lost in North County forever.

Tommy Lewis learned fishing as a boy. His first boat, a flat-bottomed skiff, was purchased for $11 with money he earned collecting bottles from the Encinitas dump. He was 11 years old at the time and already learning gill net fishing from Stan Lewis, his father.

Stan would often take Tommy out into a big surf, kill the boat engine and tell his son to get them back to shore. “He believed in knowing how to row,” Tommy remembers with a laugh.

“And my father was a daredevil. One Friday the 13th he broke a mirror, petted a black cat, walked under a ladder and parachuted from an airplane into a school of sharks--just to prove that the variety wasn’t dangerous.

“He pulled me from school when I was 15 so that I could help him fish. I only went to school two days a week. I was really small, and the surf was huge, 10 feet. He said, ‘There won’t be anybody else out there today, and you’ll kill ‘em.’ I was scared then, but now the ocean is where I feel the safest.”

Tommy’s father learned ocean fishing from Dick Heiner. Heiner, who died in 1980, was the man Stan had seen rowing ashore that summer day in 1933 when he decided he would become a fisherman. Later, Heiner would become more than mentor to Lewis--he would become his father-in-law. When Lewis arrived in Solana Beach, he had no place better to go, so he bunked down in one of the caves on the beach.

It was there that he met the fishermen of North County who would camp in the caves along the coast during the fishing season. Each night, over a bottle of port and a campfire, they told romantic stories of the sea, stories that further reinforced Lewis’ career decision.

And each day Lewis approached the fisherman he had first seen rowing ashore, offering to help him out. Finally, Heiner agreed to his request.

Slowly and painfully, Lewis learned the craft. He learned to set a line for shark, to fish with a gill net, to build and set a lobster trap, and to filet a fish without wasting any of the precious meat.

Lewis had found a new love in fishing, and another in Heiner’s daughter, Mae, whom he later married.

Soon Lewis had his own boat and his own stories.

Today, his widow, Mae Lewis, still tells the stories--including the one about the octopus:

“My husband was fishing for rock cod when he reeled in something very heavy. When he got it to the surface, he found that a huge octopus had come up to eat the fish. It was bigger than the 16-foot boat he was in, and he tried to cut the line, but it was too late.

“The octopus attached itself to the bottom of the boat, and nearly sunk it. Stan sharpened his knife on his stone and went around cutting off the tentacles that had reached clear over the side of the boat. The octopus still would not let go. Stan managed to get the boat in through the surf with the octopus still attached to the bottom.

“On shore, some men put the octopus in a wagon and paraded it through the streets of Encinitas. It had come from very deep water, and it was bright red.”

Mae Lewis, now in her 60s, has heard fishing stories from her father, her husband and her son.

“There used to be a small landing for the boats at Swami’s,” she said. “There were three or four boats there, three or four at Seaside Reef and a few in Oceanside. The boats were left there all the time. The fishermen, some of whom camped out on the beach in tents, were allowed to drive onto the beach in their Model A’s and Model T’s and haul out their catch.

“Paramahansa Yogananda (the founder of the temple on the Swami’s cliff known as Self Realization Fellowship) would come to the beach with bodyguards each day. My father would offer him fish, but Yogananda was a strict vegetarian, so Dad would offer him things from the sea like starfish and shells, which he accepted,” Mae recalled.

“Once when the fishing was bad, and Dad hadn’t caught anything in several days, he told Yogananda about it. Yogananda said, ‘Don’t worry.’ He blessed the boat, and the next day it nearly sank from the weight of the sharks he pulled in.”

Then, sharks were an important catch along the North County coast.

“The first time that my father caught a great white shark, he didn’t know what it was,” said Mae. He gave the fish to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and over the years he gave the facility so many more specimens that it dedicated a book on sharks to him.

Although shark fishing was a profitable catch, it was not because of its meat. Most of the men fished for shark because the U.S. government was paying $13 each for shark livers, which are very high in Vitamin A.

“During World War II, my husband made up to $1,000 a day catching shark. Once he bought a new Cadillac with money earned from just three days’ work,” Mae said.

When synthetic Vitamin A was developed in the ‘60s, the market for shark fishing dried up.

“Fishing has always had its good and bad years,” Mae said.

“One year when it was really bad, one of the guys, his name was Kline, decided to auction off his boat and motor. He sold tickets all over town for a dollar each, and my husband bought five of them. About a week later, Stan saw Kline and asked him what happened to the boat. Kline told him, ‘You won’t believe this, but my wife bought the last ticket and won the boat herself.’ ”

Gene Meirlot, 64, has fished in North County for almost 50 years. He knew Dick Heiner. He was a partner to Stan Lewis. He helped teach Tommy Lewis to fish.

Meirlot, who has lost five boats to the surf, has come to know the shark well.

A few years back, he and his friend Nick Eaton caught an 18-foot great white shark off Carlsbad.

“There are a lot of sharks around here. Once, Stan Lewis reached over the side to wash blood from his hands and as soon as he pulled them back a shark snapped where his hands had been. After that we used a bucket to wash our hands,” Meirlot said.

Meirlot says that fishing is the only thing he has ever wanted to do, even though it’s a hard life. “If you know what you’re doing, you’ll just make wages. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll go broke.

“Commercial fishermen have been blamed for ruining fishing, but I’ve rarely seen a commercial fisherman who didn’t use whatever he caught or put it back into the ocean.”

Meirlot said that most commercial fishermen are like him: They love the ocean and everything in it. He does not think the use of gill nets is a threat to the ocean or anything in it.

The controversy over gill net fishing has raged for years. The fight has been led by Doris Allen, a California assemblywoman from Orange County. Allen describes gill nets as “devastating to our coastal environment.”

When, after a five-year effort, she was unable to get action from the Legislature, she campaigned to put the issue on the ballot last November. Backing her in the effort was the sportfishing industry, which has argued that commercial fishermen take more than their share of fish from the ocean.

Proposition 132, the Marine Resources Protection Act, was approved by 55.5% of voters.

Gill nets are a thin-filament mesh spread out like underwater volleyball nets. As fish swim into the nets, they are trapped. The size of the mesh openings is designed to snare specific fish--such as halibut--by the gills. Use of the nets has been likened to strip-mining the ocean and criticized because the nets can also trap other kinds of sea life, including sea lions, porpoises and whales.

Blaine Hughs of Helgrene’s Sport Fishing Trips in Oceanside has mixed feelings on the issue. “I’ve seen the fishing diminish significantly over the last few years. I think that something needed to be done to bring the biomass back up to an acceptable level,” he said.

“Still, it’s my personal opinion that, when gill nets are set and retrieved properly, they don’t do any harm. Otherwise they can be harmful. The main culprits are the high-seas gill netters. They put a fence over migratory paths of all fish. Non-selective harvesting doesn’t do anybody any good.”

Tommy Lewis says the fishing nets he uses are made for halibut, and usually that’s all he catches in them. The mesh is 8 inches wide, and shorts (fish of illegally small size) slip right through, he said.

“I’ve been fishing the Cardiff area for over 30 years, and I’ve never caught a whale or a porpoise. I wouldn’t want to,” he said. “Once I pulled up a net and there was a huge hole in it where a whale had broken through it. The nets are made to break if a whale or a porpoise hits them.” To emphasize his point, Lewis easily snaps the line with his hands.

When he is not out fishing, Tommy Lewis is working on his fishing equipment. He builds his own boats and lobster traps. During lobster season, Tommy figures he loses half of his 300 traps to violent swells that push down from the Aleutian Islands. In 1983, all but two of his traps were swept from their beds.

This day, he is working in the yard outside his Olivenhain home. His boat dominates one portion of the dirt and gravel yard. He is twisting wire into the cages that will be used to trap lobster.

“I’ve been a fisherman all my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t fish,” he says.

His wife, Gail, and their baby daughter, Amanda Mae, enter the yard from their rustic wooden house. Tommy’s face brightens and he gently takes the baby in his arms.

This is a close-knit family. Tommy’s mother, Mae, is his next-door neighbor in one direction; his sister in the other.

Tommy recalls what the family feels is a prophetic story from the day he was born: His mother sat up in her bed at Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, looked out the window toward the ocean, and saw her father row by, pulling his lobster traps.

A new generation of fisherman had been born.

Tommy Lewis looks to his daughter and says with a smile: “I think she’s ready to start fishing.”

It’s a smile rooted in the hope that here will be fishing and fish in North County by the time she’s old enough to catch them.

The fish and lobster Lewis catches are distributed to local fish houses and restaurants through Pacific Shell Fish, which also sells nationwide.