Loading the Basses : Anglers Hope to Replenish a Dwindling Fish Population

About every five months or so from now on, a pickup truck is scheduled to pull up to the dock in front of the Harbor Patrol station at Dana Point Harbor.

Attendants will open a large tank of seawater on the truck’s back end. Then, using a wide hose, they will siphon the water into three underwater pens separated by fishnet. Swooshing down the long hose will be thousands of tiny baby white sea bass.

“It’s exciting,” said Bob DeNault, president of the Dana Point Anglers Club and one of the overseers of the first such delivery in mid-December. “All of us take fish out of the ocean to eat; now we feel like we’re putting something back.”

The Dana Point Fisheries Enhancement Program is the latest installment of an experiment that aims to eventually replenish the ocean off Southern California. The project, sponsored by the state Department of Fish and Game, will create a series of “grow-out” pens along the coast similar to the ones at Dana Point, where baby sea bass raised in a hatchery can be protected and fed until their release into the open sea.

“The program is unique in several ways,” said Steve Crooke, the senior Fish and Game marine biologist who coordinates it. “We’re very interested in seeing if you can enhance the wild stock in this way.”

The program, financed by a $2.50 annual tax on each fishing license sold in California, “is the tip of the iceberg,” DeNault said. “Someday we’ll be replenishing the ocean like they do the lakes now.”

It began in the early 1980s as a research project involving various species of fish. Four years ago, Crooke said, the researchers began focusing on the white sea bass, a popular eating fish that once dotted Southern California waters but has become rare because of overfishing and offshore development.

“It’s a trophy fish,” DeNault said of the white- and black-striped bass, which averages about nine pounds when fully grown but can weigh up to 80. Once estimated to number about 2 million in local waters, the white sea bass population today is believed to number less than 100,000.

“We have guys who go out fishing 10 times and don’t get even one,” DeNault said.

While the fish traditionally were unprotected, legislation enacted a few years ago limits anglers to one white sea bass per day at a minimum size of 28 inches. And a law being written in Sacramento, fishermen say, would restrict the ability of commercial anglers to catch this and other species.

To help replenish the white sea bass, the Hubbs Sea World Research Institute in San Diego began hatching sea bass from about 100 spawning fish caught in the wild.

Housed in large, covered outdoor pools, the spawners are kept breeding year-round by the manipulation of light and water temperature in a constant simulation of springtime, their natural breeding season. Once fertilized, the eggs are moved to indoor incubator tanks where the fish hatch in about two days and begin feeding on plankton. Later, the baby fish are moved into large fiberglass pools. When they reach about two inches long, they are taken by truck to one of the region’s “grow-out” pens in Dana Point, Newport Harbor, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Redondo Beach and Catalina Island.

Volunteer sportfishermen monitor the fish in the pens and feed them specially prepared pellets for about five months before releasing them into the ocean. And five years later, according to Crooke, the fully grown fish should be big enough to catch legally. “It’s not a put-and-take fishery,” he said of the project. “We’re putting a lot of small fish out there that you have to wait a long time to catch.”

Since its beginning, according to Donald B. Kent, the marine biologist overseeing the program at Hubbs, the project has released an estimated 200,000 juvenile white sea bass into the ocean at a rate of about 50,000 a year. With the expected completion of a new hatchery in Carlsbad this summer, he said, that yearly output could reach 300,000.

“All of the fish are tagged so that we can track them later,” Kent said. “If they aren’t making a big dent that is real obvious (in the wild) by the year 2000, then we’ll know we’re doing something wrong.”

Down at Dana Point Harbor, though, members of the Dana Point Anglers Club who have been tending the new underwater pens daily since receiving their first shipment of baby sea bass on Dec. 14 think they’re doing something right.

“We’ve had an incredible number of volunteers,” DeNault said. “There’s a big awareness right now that the ocean is a limited resource and you can’t just keep taking things out of it. Finally, something’s being done.”