The King of Beefs : Sea Lion Is Focus of Anger From Anglers, Who Increasingly See Their Catches Devoured Before the Fish Can Be Pulled From Water

Tony Sanchez stepped off the boat and boarded the Redondo Beach barge, as he has done twice a week for five years. He baited his hook with a live anchovy and cast it over the rail.

Bonito were boiling on the surface.

One took Sanchez’s bait and “ran” from the barge at what seemed an incredible speed. Sanchez knew this meant trouble. It wouldn’t be long before the presence of an uncontrollable force would put an end to his battle.

Sure enough, a large brown mass shot out from under the barge, homing in on the fleeing fish in a matter of seconds.

When Sanchez’s line went slack, he reeled in. Dangling from his hook was the head of a small bonito. Sanchez shook his head as he unhooked it and tossed it overboard.

A large sea lion, perhaps weighing nearly a ton, had taken another fish from the 56-year-old Carson resident. It rolled over in the distance, the tail of the bonito protruding from its mouth, then disappeared back under the barge to wait for another easy meal.

“Oh, he’s here every day,” said Mark Willey, 25, bargemaster for the last five years. “We know because he has a big white lump on his head.”

And an appetite that won’t quit.

The sea lion, and a few smaller sea lions, mount a continuous assault on the fish hooked by customers from the time they arrive at the barge at 7 a.m. until the time they leave in the evening.

“Me and the seal, we sometimes split,” Sanchez said. “He gives me the head and takes the good part. It gets worse every day.

“People enjoy (fishing on the barge), especially the older folks. But now people are coming out here, they get disgusted. It’s a lot of fun. But the seals, they’re getting bigger every day.”

Sanchez’s sentiments are widely shared.

“Right now, there is a school of mackerel just east of Church Rock (at the east end of Santa Catalina Island), which is three quarters of a mile long and a school of squid that is about a quarter of a mile long,” said Frank Hall, owner of 22nd St. Landing in San Pedro. “And the sea lions are on top of them. I was out there on the (sportfisher) Grande the other day and saw a man get three barracuda eaten, and I saw a sea lion chewing on a yellowtail.

“What happens is you hook up and it slows the fish. Normally the sea lion couldn’t catch the fish but . . . anything injured in the ocean becomes prey. It sends out panic waves or vibrations, and when the fish is hooked the sea lions jump all over it.”

Jim Peterson, owner of the vessel First String, was contacted near Catalina Tuesday morning and said he was forced to move because one of the “dogs” had just arrived.

“So far, we’ve only had one sea lion, but it shut us off,” Peterson said. “The barracuda were biting and they were biting good. But the sea lions always get their share. You always think they’ve had enough, but they always come back for more.”

The sea lion population has grown since the enactment in 1972 of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which made it a federal offense to kill or even harass the animals--with certain exceptions.

According to statistics compiled by the National Marine Fisheries Service, there were an estimated 5,000 sea lion pups born in 1972. Currently, an estimated 25,000 pups are born annually.

Consequently, the state’s sea lion population has increased from an estimated 5,000 in 1972 to about 110,000.

Jim Lecky, the chief of protected resources for the NMFS, said that despite pleas by fishermen, there are no plans to relax the laws pertaining to the killing of sea lions because that would mean placing the species in the same jeopardy it was 20 years ago.

“It’s a pretty protective law,” Lecky said. “Essentially what the fishermen would like is to substantially reduce the sea lion population, and that would mean killing off large quantities of the animals to no good end.”

Commercial fishermen, who used to shoot the animals as regularly as they would appear, are not authorized to destroy the animals unless they face “imminent danger of life or gear,” according to Lisa Kaplan, an attorney with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency that overlooks the NMFS.

For anyone else, it is illegal to feed, kill or harass the animals. The only exception is a small explosive device designed to scare the sea lions from a given area, approved for use by operators of commercial and sportfishing vessels.

“We used to take care of the problem with a 12-gauge,” said Hall, who has been running boats in local waters for the last 50 years. “Most fellas had that. They used to supply me with the ammo right here (at the landing).”

Peterson added: “We used to blow (the sea lions) away.”

That practice was carried on, at times brazenly, for a time after 1972, until the public became increasingly aware of the law protecting the animals and began to complain to authorities.

Hall recalled one night years ago when he shot at one of the animals that surfaced near the stern: “He swam up under the lights with blood bubbling from its throat. A guy came up to me and said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ ”

The man turned Hall in. “They said it would cost me $600 if I wanted to fight it or $300 if I just paid the fine, so I paid the fine,” Hall said.

Peterson was once fined $2,000 for “scaring” two sea lions with his gun.

“It cost $1,500 to kill one and $1,000 to harass them,” Peterson said. “At least it did 10 years ago.”

Kaplan said the NMFS has the authority to assess fines of up to $10,000 for violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. “They vary, depending on the situation and who they are,” Kaplan said.

In 1989, in a widely publicized case, Randolph T. Mansfield of Long Beach, a former employee at the bait storage barge inside Redondo’s King Harbor, was charged with killing one of the federally protected animals by feeding it an explosive device concealed in a sardine.

Mansfield was given the maximum sentence of one year in prison, fined $500 and put on one year’s probation.

The sea lion, named “Bobo” by residents and boaters who had grown fond of the animal, was found floating in the harbor. Federal investigators said they were aided in the case by “a flood of calls” that poured in after NBC publicized the investigation on its “Unsolved Mysteries” program.

Steven E. Mitchell of Redondo Beach was cited as a co-defendant and sentenced to 60 days in a community treatment center, fined $500, placed on five years’ probation and assigned 1,200 hours of community service.

Willey said he knows of one customer who tried to dissuade the animals by injecting a mackerel “with the hottest hot sauce he can find” and throwing it over for the sea lion to devour. “But that didn’t work,” Willey added.

In fact, Willey said, the sea lions around the barge, led by the large bull, are growing not only fatter but bolder, often leaping out of the water to grab the fish as they are being reeled in.

“It’s getting bad (everywhere), but it’s really bad for us because we can’t move,” Willey said. “They know the barge. They know it’s a free meal here.”