Requiem for the Felucca

On the Avalon dock, everything seems the same. Jerry Cicconi walks down the dock, toward the harbor taxi, and the old crowd says hello. The old crowd does not acknowledge mainlanders, or German tourists just off the ferry, or 21-year-olds in G-strings sucking Slurpies. The old crowd acknowledges its own.

“Ehhhhh. . . . Jerry,” someone says.

“Ehh. . . . Guadalupe.”

Thirty years Cicconi has been walking down this dock. Ever since he came over from San Benidito del Tronto, a nice enough town on the Adriatic. But not so nice that it offered Cicconi anything more than a job as secondo motorista , otherwise known as engine wiper, on a fishing boat that would never, ever become his own.

Cicconi’s own boat now sits in Avalon harbor, courtesy of American opportunity. It is named the Felucca because that is what the Sicilians call the harpoon thrower on a swordfish boat. For 30 years, swordfish have been Cicconi’s life.

Cicconi is taking me to see the Felucca this morning. We glide out in the harbor taxi and climb onto the deck. Here, too, everything seems as always. The Felucca looks ready to go. There are bunks for two men, a crow’s nest for keeping the swordfish watch, and the brass harpoons.

But the Felucca’s appearance is a trick. The Felucca, in fact, is dead. It will hunt no more for swordfish.

That is because, Cicconi says, there is no swordfish to be hunted. From Santa Barbara to San Diego, the ocean that once produced enough swordfish to keep the Felucca and 40 other harpoon boats in flourishing business has crashed.

And Cicconi is confident that he knows the reason why. It is the drift nets. They first appeared around 1980, and soon there were dozens of boats with miles of monofilament net. Each day the nets were set free to drift over the continental shelf of Southern California.

“They made a desert of the ocean,” Cicconi says. “They’re still doing it. They catch swordfish and halibut, all of them. They also catch seals and porpoises and manta rays. They catch sharks and sometimes they catch whales.”

A sad thing, he says. Most people do not even know that swordfish traditionally were caught with hand-thrown harpoons. They do not know that, until five years ago, the harpooners produced much of the swordfish supply in Southern California.

It is not easy to kill a swordfish with what is essentially a spear, Cicconi says. Each morning of the season the harpoon boats would set out with two men apiece. And each boat would hunt, literally hunt, the wide ocean until it caught the telltale sign of a swordfish fin on the surface.

“And then the chase was on,” Cicconi says. “The harpoon man climbed onto the boom. The boom stretched out 40 feet in front of the boat. And there he waited while his partner tried to steer the boat so the boom was just over the swordfish.”

It was like hunting tigers. You got them one at a time, he says. And no boat got very many. The average catch of a good boat was 200 swordfish per season. But it was enough to earn a living, and the swordfish population stayed healthy.

In those years the harpooners constituted a kind of fraternity. Cicconi often hunted with his brother, Virgil, and in the evenings they would throw parties for the other fishermen on the Felucca.

“We would bring on a 5-gallon cask of red wine and a 5-gallon cask of white,” Cicconi says. “The party lasted until the wine was gone. It was the best kind of life.”

But no more. The drift nets came and, one by one, the harpoon boats died off. The annual catch of the Felucca went from 200 swordfish to 50 to pretty much nothing.

It is ironic, Cicconi says, that the United States should be hounding Korea and other Asian nations that employ drift nets in the Pacific even while it permits the same thing in its own waters. The only difference is the size of the nets, he says. They’re a little shorter here.

In any case, Cicconi was one of the last to go. He kept trying until last September, when the truth sank in. He knew the time had come.

Cicconi took his boat to the waters west of Catalina Island, cut the engines and walked forward to the bow. First he removed the bolts that fastened the swordfish boom to the deck. Then he picked up an ax.

Only two steel cables held the boom in place. He swung the ax at the cables and it gave way. The boom, which had been with him on a thousand swordfish hunts, that made the Felucca different from all other kinds of boats, slid down into the Pacific.