Where the Action Is : When Barracuda Finally Start Biting, It Seems as if They Won’t Stop, and Conditions Could Make It a Big Year for Local Sportfishers

At 6 a.m. sharp, skipper Sean Humphrey fires up the engines of the Islander, and at 6:01 the sportfishing boat is away from San Pedro’s 22nd Street Landing.

The game is afoot. Barracuda beware.

“There hasn’t been a day we haven’t had a minimum of 65,” deckhand Eddie Fitzgerald says.

Those were slow days. One day during the current, bountiful bite in the San Pedro Channel, the Islander caught 530 barracuda for 53 passengers--limits for everyone. This day, dawning clear and calm, would come close. But first they must play a game of hide and seek.

“Barracuda don’t stay in any one spot, especially this time of year when they’re migrating,” says one angler, Joe Nunn, who is studying for a Ph.D. in marine biology.

The barracuda chase schools of tiny baitfish, in this case anchovies. The baitfish drift with the currents around the channel from Huntington Beach to Point Fermin and as far out as Santa Catalina Island, with the barracuda never far behind.

The Islander, formerly the original Red Rooster and then the Point Loma, is now owned by Mark Pisano and Paul Strasser. It’s one of more than a dozen half- and three-quarter-day sportfishing boats that ply the channel. They use electronic fish-finders that show fish below as tiny red blips and sonar that scans out to 400 feet.

“Sometimes you pay too much attention to these things,” Humphrey says. “You just have to put your anchor down and fish .”

There is some limited cooperation among certain boats.

Nils Jernstrom, skipper of the Victory, asks Humphrey by radio, “Are you finding anything yet?”

“Not yet. I’m looking. How’d you do yesterday?”

“We ended up with 124.”

Fitzgerald comes into the wheelhouse for binoculars and scans the horizon, looking for birds. Where there are birds, there are usually fish. Danny Ilustre, the other deckhand, stands atop the bait tanks throwing out anchovies as chum. At 7:05 Humphrey cuts back on the throttles. A few terns are diving for the chum.

“But they’re in the area for a reason,” Humphrey says. “They’re ‘barracuda-type’ birds.”

He flips on the public-address system and announces: “We’ll give it a try here for a while.”

Seven minutes later Fitzgerald barks: “One short at the bow.”

Translation: One barracuda shorter than the legal 28 inches has been caught, raising hope that a school is there. At 7:20, Calvin Mateer of El Segundo pulls in a legal catch, but the other 35 anglers aren’t getting anything. Humphrey grows impatient.

“Not enough fish here,” he announces, starting the engines.

Farther on he turns slow circles near the Victory and the Islander’s sister ship, the Monte Carlo, as Ilustre and Fitzgerald throw chum, without luck. They move toward an area about five miles off the Long Beach breakwater.

Ilustre says: “We may be Catalina-bound.”

They are confident they could find barracuda at the island, but that’s a 3 1/2-hour round trip--time that can’t be spent fishing. It’s almost 8:30. Some passengers already are shedding jackets and shirts as the day warms up.

“We’ll give this another 10 minutes,” Humphrey says.

But after only five minutes he tells the passengers: “I can’t stand this. We’re going to head over to Catalina.”

He starts the engines. The anchor is almost up when an angler hooks a barracuda, but loses it. Humphrey decides to wait another two minutes.

Then, a bite on the port side . . . a bite on starboard. Humphrey walks back to check the action from the bridge.

“Four hangin’! . . . five hangin’!” he says, noting the number of hookups suddenly in progress. “We’ll drop the anchor again.”

In the next three hours, the 36 anglers will take nearly 300 barracuda, not counting a fewundersized ones they release. It seems half the boat is calling for a gaff all at once. Fitzgerald and Ilustre are hustling everywhere. Even Humphrey pitches in. Soon everyone on the boat is sprinkled with fish scales flying through the air.

“This is why barracuda are so popular,” Humphrey says. “When they bite, it’s like this.”

Greg Watson, the Islander’s cook, and Fitzgerald figured starting the engines pushed the baitfish out from under the boat and turned on the barracuda--a technique Humphrey will use successfully whenever the bite slows down. Soon the word spreads and the Islander’s square mile of ocean becomes a parking lot for several other sportfishers and a couple of dozen small private boats who suspect that this is where the action is.

The downside, Watson notes, is that when such a bite is on, his galley business drops off about 50%. So he grabs a rod and joins in.

Last year the barracuda and other warm-water species rode the tepid currents of an El Nino phenomenon into local waters for one of the best sportfishing seasons in years. This one could be better, says Steve Crooke, a California Department of Fish and Game marine biologist based in Long Beach--not because of another El Nino, but the residual effects of the last one, as well as the one before that in ‘82-83. More than 80% of the catches are longer than the 28-inch minimum.

“Most of these are big fish, 7 or 8 years old, due to some real good recruitment after the ’83 El Nino,” Crooke says.

Also, Crooke adds: “(Since last season) the fish didn’t go very far south. I suspect many southern-migrating fish may have found waters off Mexico warm enough to remain throughout the winter.”

That means, Crooke said, that other warm-water species, including tuna, should arrive in local waters by early July instead of later in the summer when the water temperature peaks.

“This year looks good for warm-water fish,” Crooke says.

And what’s good for the fish is great for the sportfishing operations, with some reservations.

“Right now the three-quarter and half-day boats are getting the lion’s share of the barracuda and bass,” says Don Ashley, who operates 14 boats from four Southern California landings from Redondo Beach to Seal Beach.

“Our overnight boats (to Catalina) will catch as many or more fish, but the people don’t go overnight to catch barracuda. We need the exotics: the yellowtail, sea bass and tuna. Right now, local fishing--Santa Monica Bay, Horseshoe Kelp, the front side of Catalina, Newport--are very good for the big barracuda and more and more sand bass. But our island boats, we’re at the dock at all the landings.

“The best-case scenario would be if the island boats were catching tuna, the local boats were catching barracuda and yellowtail and the sundown boats were catching sand bass. Everybody would be catching something.”

That’s how it was at times last year.

“But it rarely works that way,” Ashley said.

*

Ashley isn’t a marine biologist, but after more than 30 years of fishing local waters he knows the signs well enough to share Crooke’s optimism.

“All winter long we were seeing sea turtles, so the warm water never left completely or they would have been gone,” Ashley said. “Two to three degrees makes a huge difference.”

Last Friday, a San Diego sportfisher caught a 25-pound yellowfin tuna only 88 miles south of Point Loma. Earlier catches this year were more than 300 miles south, about a five-day trip. Are the tuna coming?

“Last year it didn’t start until July 17,” Ashley said. “This year it won’t take nearly as long.”

Ashley and other sportfishers dream of those rare days he describes as when “the birds are picking at the bait, the fish are chasing the bait, the bait’s jumping out of the water and the seals and the sharks are jumping in it. Everything is in a feeding frenzy. That’s what we want. That’s when they bite anything.”

The anglers like the barracuda for their aggressive action.

“They’re not bad eating, either,” Mike Goto of El Monte says. “A lot of people think they’re junk fish.”

Goto likes his barracuda marinated with salt, coarse ground pepper and olive oil, then broiled or barbecued. Mateer has a more complex recipe involving soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, Liquid Smoke, garlic and two cans of beer, left overnight before smoking the following afternoon.

“It drives the neighbors crazy,” he says.

The final tally is 306 barracuda, along with a few incidental sand bass. On the way home Fitzgerald rates the day an 8 on a scale of 10.

“Sorry the fishing was so bad today,” Humphrey says on the public address system. “I wish it was always this bad.”