No Mere Ancient Mariner : At 76, McEwen Has Seen Southland Sportfishing Grow--and Supply of Fish Shrink

Ed McEwen watched from the Pacific Queen as anglers and deckhands from Frank LoPreste’s Royal Polaris spread their bounty of yellowfin tuna over the concrete concourse at Fisherman’s Landing, wall to wall. If McEwen were inclined to rages born of frustration, he might have split the rail with one of his large, hard fists, and his deep voice could have been heard all around Fish Harbor.

But McEwen was quiet and relaxed, knowing that although this day was the Royal Polaris’ day, tomorrow could easily be the Pacific Queen’s.

“You never know from one day to the next,” McEwen said. “Nobody can be right on ‘em all the time.”

If McEwen has learned one thing in his 60-some years in the sportfishing business, it’s that “you can’t out-guess the fish.”

McEwen will be one of a couple of dozen skippers sharing such knowledge Nov. 5 at the Sportfishing Assn. of California’s Casino Night fund raiser at Ports O’ Call Village on the San Pedro waterfront. He has been doing it longer than any of them, since the very beginning of Southern California’s sportfishing industry.

“I’ve seen it all,” he says.

McEwen, 76, is the Santiago of the Southland. Hemingway should have done at least a chapter on him. He has seen sportfishing when you got a cane pole with a hand line and could fish all day for $2 and were home sipping whiskey before the horizon swallowed the sun like a marlin grabbing a mackerel and “we thought a long trip was (from Long Beach) to the Huntington Beach Flats,” because there was no reason to go any farther, unless your appetite was for bluefin, and then you simply went to Santa Catalina Island, the island of romance, where the sun felt warm and the sea promised . . . nothing.

Hemingway aside, McEwen would prefer to believe the only thing he and old man Santiago have in common is an affinity for the sea.

“I thank God every day that he’s given me the health and the ability to do what I like to do,” he said. “I love to fish, and I feel good when I’m on the ocean.”

He has seen the industry survive the Great Depression and World War II. But old? Only in that he was around when deckhands worked only for the fish they could catch and sell, and when instinct, not electronics, told you when to tell your customers to reach for their rigs.

“It was dog-eat-dog,” McEwen said. “Still is.”

Well, maybe not that bad. SAC, organized by Bill Nott in 1972, has unified the Southern California sportfishing industry to work for common interests. Rival boats often share information on where the fish are. It’s competitive, but it’s not cut-throat anymore.

“It’s like a game,” McEwen said. “Everybody wants to win. You want to be the high boat. You want to carry the most passengers because that’s where the money is.”

Ah, but the good old days were something else.

McEwen grew up in Long Beach.

“I started fishing in the late ‘20s on the Music,” he said. “It was like a carnival (on) the Pine Avenue Pier. Every boat had its own barker. ‘Come ride the big, fast Music! . . . Come ride the Paula G! . . . The Moonlight! The Water Witch!’

“I’d come down after school and haul people’s fish off the pier for tips. I’d fish on weekends. The boat crews did not get paid. We got two spots alongside the bait tank to fish. You could buy a $10 commercial license and you were legal to sell fish. That’s how I worked my way through school. That was a way of life.”

McEwen and Nott worked side by side on the Music as teen-agers.

“The fish were large,” McEwen said. “The equipment was bad--well, not good--big, old linen line. When it got wet it’d swell up like a rope. You couldn’t break it, but you couldn’t cast it very well, either.

“In 1936, the guys in the Tuna Club (at Avalon) were agitated because sport boats were over there catching yellowfin tuna and selling ‘em. They didn’t like the competition in catching fish they wanted to weigh in for the Tuna Club.”

So, McEwen says, the politically positioned members of the Tuna Club got a law passed, making it illegal to sell fish caught on a sportfishing vessel, and a lot of deckhands had to find other ways to make a living. McEwen took out state license No. 13--he wasn’t superstitious--and started running a boat in 1937 from the old Santa Clara Landing in Long Beach.

“We more or less started the run to Catalina Island from Long Beach,” he said. “The normal fare in those days was $2. We were going to charge $3 because we had a twin-screw boat, the Sea Sport, and there was only two of them in operation (in Southern California).

“Everybody says, ‘You’ll never make it. People won’t pay that much to go fishing.’ But it was very popular. We caught lots of fish, including tuna. In those days you could catch a lot of bluefin right at Catalina.”

Most sportfishing shut down with World War II.

“If you fished out of the Port of Long Beach or San Pedro there were submarine nets, and they wouldn’t drop the nets to let you out before 8 o’clock in the morning,” McEwen said. “There were all kinds of albacore out there but very few boats could or would fish them because you had to leave so late.

“Most of the good boats were requisitioned during the war so they could make fireboats out of them, including the boat I was running. I ran a passenger vessel from Mormon Island in Wilmington to Cal Shipyard, and I also ran a twin Diesel water taxi to the Channel Islands when they were building bases up there. Only two of us were allowed outside to make those trips. We carried Corps of Army Engineers and high-test aviation gas. No piers. We had to roll everything overboard, put a line on it and snake it through the surf.”

After the war, McEwen and the late Pop Leavitt bought a boat, the Fisherman, and started running trips in 1947. They operated Pacific Landing until 1971, when Long Beach needed the property for the Gerald Desmond Bridge. McEwen moved to San Diego.

“It’s a far cry now from the early days of sportfishing,” McEwen said. “It was a tough business, but the fishing was great.

“Nowadays, we have all the electronics, with fish finders and navigation equipment and air-conditioning, but we don’t have the fishing we had then. It seems we’re having to go farther out all the time. Sportfishing needs more protection.

“A large part of (the problem) is overfishing commercially. Certainly, the sport boats have put a big dent in the population. But the biggest single thing has been the gill-netters in the Micronesian South Pacific. Just absolutely annihilated them. Monday we had five bluefin tuna and two big yellowfin tuna. Three out of those seven fish had net marks on them.

“Pollution has certainly hurt. We’ve cleaned up our ocean a lot in the last 10 years. I don’t see the Styrofoam cups and beer cans floating around like I used to. But the United States coastline and the world as a whole needs to find a better way of disposing of sewage other than dumping it in the sea. The ocean is like a big room. All you’re doing is sweeping it from one corner to the other.”

SAC, now headed by Bob Fletcher, with Nott still pulling an oar as president emeritus, has helped sportfishing by fighting the domestic and international political battles to keep the industry afloat.

“It has unified sportfishing and done for the group as a unit what none of us could ever do as individuals,” McEwen said.

Another boost has been the recent tuna bite, but the boats still have to find them.

“As I was just explaining to the crew, we’ve been running a day and a half and (usually) fishing outside, trying to get the big bluefin,” McEwen said. “We’ve been pretty successful at it, except (one day) we got into a big school of fish and landed only five out of 30, 35 hookups, although the smallest fish of the five was 164 pounds.”

On the next trip, McEwen, noting that half his passengers had light tackle, polled them on their preference: bluefin or yellowfin. Yellowfin won.

“It was one of those slick, hot, glassy days with no current and the fish would lay down underneath you and wouldn’t bite,” McEwen said.

But there is always tomorrow, and the intermittent El Nino currents that brought warmer water in recent years are expected to return in 1995, McEwen has been told.

“It looks very much like we could have another very big tuna year,” he said.

Clearly, it’s no time to quit.

Tickets to the SAC Casino Night fund-raiser Nov. 5 at Ports O’ Call in San Pedro are $35, with sales limited to 300. Details: (619) 226-6455.