Hallelujah for Halibut : Angler Dave Faxon Lives for Daily Obsession in Santa Monica Bay

Somewhere in the Santa Monica Bay, buried in sand to its eyes, is a small halibut with a sore mouth and a little yellow tag in its side.

That is the latest flatfish to flounder into the big, leathery hands of Dave Faxon. The bay is full of them.

And somewhere out in the bay, trolling slowly along on his floating home, is Faxon, trying to get his hooks into another.

For 21 years, the retired plumber has lived on his 33-foot trawler, El Pescador , in Marina del Rey.

“If you want to call it living,” he said, sipping a cup of coffee in his galley before a recent trip. “The rent (for the slip) was $80 a month when I came and now it’s $585. They’re killing me.”

Perhaps, but the rising cost of living hasn’t kept him from doing what he enjoys more than anything else: catching halibut.

“I’ve hung in with the halibut for years,” he said. “I like ‘em.”

Like ‘em ?

Faxon, 67, is obsessed with them.

Since he started keeping records in 1981, the gruff but personable skipper said he has caught more than 11,000 halibut, most in the Santa Monica Bay. He has fished almost exclusively for flatfish since long before that, so the number is probably closer to 15,000.

In recent years, he has been involved in an effort to tag halibut so that experts may learn more about their migration patterns and determine the state of the fishery.

“He’s tagged more than 2,000 fish in my program,” said John Bourget, spearheading the effort with the help of a Museum of Natural History biologist and dozens of volunteer taggers. “He’s not only a heck of a fisherman, but my top individual tagger.”

Though the tagging program is in its initial stages--they hope to eventually tag 100,000 fish--it is becoming apparent that halibut don’t travel as much as believed.

“We used to think they migrated up from Mexico,” Bourget said. “But we’re finding that they don’t move around too much. More than 90% (of the tagged halibut recaptured) are being caught in the same area they were tagged.”

That means the small halibut Faxon caught the other day might someday make its way back onto his boat, and, if it’s the right size, onto a skillet in his galley.

Faxon, who has caught more than a dozen tagged fish, including one that swam into the bay from Oxnard and another from San Diego, only keeps halibut that barely surpass the minimum size limit of 22 inches.

“I like to tag and release a really big one,” he said, “so somebody will catch it someday and say, ‘Who’s the . . . who didn’t keep this fish?’ ”

Faxon has another reason: The bigger fish aren’t as good to eat as the smaller ones.

“As far as eating goes, the 22-inch ones are the good ones,” he said. “The bigger fish are dry and not as tasty. After about six pounds, the filets get too thick and they burn on the outside (when they are cooking). The smaller filets, I put them in egg and milk, break up cracker crumbs and fry ‘em in peanut oil. Once a week I have fish. But I’d rather have a T-bone steak.”

That is good for the halibut, considering how many Faxon has pulled from the bay.

“I don’t catch any more than most people,” he said. “It’s just that I’m out here more than everybody else. I go damned near every day.”

*

Faxon grew up in the Glendale area and started fishing at an early age.

“I practically lived in the L.A. River,” he said of his childhood. “We used to fish for chubs or minnows.

“Then when I got older, we would go to Toluca Lake and catch the little bluegills. We had to stay away from the gardener, who wouldn’t let us fish in there. You had to keep running and he’d yell at you, ‘Kids, get out of there!’ ”

When Faxon was 6, his parents went to the coast to look at property. They dropped him off at the Hermosa Beach pier.

With a drop line for a fishing rig, and a dried anchovy that he plied from the surface of the pier, he hauled up a 6-pound halibut. He was hooked.

“I’ve loved it ever since,” he said.

Halibut fishing is so enjoyable, Faxon said, because you never know what size fish you might catch.

“You might get a 12-inch fish, and the next one might be a 30-pounder, you know?” he said. “You go barracuda fishing, there’s not a nickel’s worth of difference (in terms of size) in any of them. Bass . . . the same way.”

Faxon’s biggest halibut: a 42-pounder he caught near Pt. Mugu in 1968. “I’ve hooked bigger,” he said. “I’ve had ‘em up to the gaff and knocked ‘em off.”

He once landed a 40-pounder off Morro Bay on six-pound test line. In Santa Monica Bay, he said, he caught two 36-pounders, a 34, two 33s “and on down.”

The all-tackle world record for California halibut is a 53-pound 4-ounce fish caught off Santa Rosa Island in 1988. One of Faxon’s fishing partners, Bill Sands of La Crescenta, caught a 49.3-pounder in September, 1993, while fishing with Faxon. The fish is still a line-class world record for 30-pound test.

“We had only two baits left and were on our last drift,” Faxon said. “A lizard fish had bitten off the trap hook (one of two hooks on Faxon’s homemade rigs), which is a treble hook that’s illegal for records. So that hook was gone and the record stands. It was the damnedest thing.”

But then, he said, life’s full of surprises when he is halibut fishing.

“I’ve caught black sea bass, yellowtail, sharks,” he said. “I had three thresher sharks last year on monofilament, but they didn’t last long. They broke the line.”

*

On a recent trip, he set out about 9:30 a.m., but he had been up long before that, fishing off the stern of his boat with a buggy-whip of a rod and a small fly.

Faxon, in part to boycott the rising cost of bait at the nearby harbor receiver, has begun catching his own. Using balled up bread as chum, he enticed smelt to his boat and loaded his bait receiver with a few dozen of the hearty little fish before heading out.

“Bait at the dock used to be about $6 a scoop and now it’s about $18,” he said. “So I started using smelt and I’ve found that catching them is half the fun. I look at each one and fantasize that it will be the one to catch me a giant halibut.”

Smelt are not typical halibut bait--most people use anchovies, squid or sardines--but Faxon is not a typical halibut fisherman.

That became apparent not long after stepping inside his cabin, which looks like a bachelor pad. Fishing plaques and trophies line the walls. An old, inoperative dial pay phone hangs on his wall. A layer of grease covers the surface of his four-burner stove. Dishes are on the counter.

From the ceiling, however, hang more than a dozen rods he not only made, but rigged specially for halibut. “I do it while I watch television,” he said.

He makes his own leaders, using a size 2/0 hook trailed by a No. 8 treble hook. Smelt are hooked in the nose with the main hook and through the vent on their bellies with the treble hook. About three feet up from the leader, Faxon attached another short leader, a 4-ounce torpedo sinker.

Somehow, the smelt’s movement in the water is natural enough to fool the fish.

On this trip, Faxon sent five of the scaly little fish over the side and put the five rods in holders around his boat and began a slow troll, using a five-horsepower motor he has rigged to his stern and operates with a small wooden captain’s wheel.

“You’ve got to go to the halibut,” he said of a practice rarely employed by others, who prefer to drift. “You’ve got to find an area where the fish are, and then you’ve got to drag the baits by. They can’t resist grabbing something going by their nose, you know?”

A few days earlier, he said, he caught 17 “shorts” and three keepers, one a 16-pounder. The day after, he caught six shorts and no keepers.

“Occasionally I come out here and don’t catch any fish,” he said. “Do you believe that? And other times I come out here and catch 20.”

Faxon’s best years were in 1986, ’89 and 90, when he caught 1,133, 1,403 and 1,472 halibut, respectively.

He has already caught a few hundred this year and says about 41% have been keepers. While he was reeling in another short, a pelican landed nearby.

“I’ve got one pelican that follows me in every day and I feed him sardines,” Faxon said. “I call him Drumstick. He’s a poor old pelican that lost a leg. He gets in water and when I throw him a smelt or something, he swims in a circle. He can only paddle one way.”

Another halibut struck, then another. Faxon reeled them in, did his thing and tossed them back.

“Looks like we’re not going to get any big fish today,” he said. “But there’s always tomorrow.”