Outdoors : Whale of a Job

Soaring high over the Pacific Ocean on his morning reconnaissance run, Larry Mebust was asked exactly what he was looking for.

“You’ll know,” he said. “It’ll look like a giant, green submarine.”

No such submarines were yet in sight, but from his vantage point in the seat of his white Cessna, Mebust could see plenty of activity on a hazy Saturday morning off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Large freighters, heading who knows where, chugging toward the horizon . . . pleasure yachts cutting frothy white paths across water . . . fishing boats not going anywhere, and whale-watch boats going everywhere, plodding aimlessly in search of the leviathans.

That’s where Mebust comes in. His mission, seven days a week, weather permitting, is to take to the sky and locate the 30- to 50-foot mammals, which from 2,000 feet up look like giant, green submarines.

Mebust, 50, a Long Beach-based commercial fishermen who hunts swordfish in the summer, has created quite a niche for himself as a whale spotter during the winter migration period of the Pacific gray whale, from the end of December through March.

“I knew a lot of these guys anyway,” he said of the local skippers. “They all did whale-watches in the wintertime. I’d listen to them on scanner, and I’d hear them out there whale-watching, but they were whale-wishing more than anything else, they weren’t seeing whales.

“So I thought, ‘Well wait a minute--maybe these guys need help.’ So I kind of created this thing. I contacted four boats, started one weekend and it became a full-time job immediately after that.”

And because it did, whale-watchers from Santa Monica to Seal Beach often have Mebust to thank as well as, if not more than, the captains who get all the credit for putting them face to barnacly face with one of the ocean’s most beloved creatures.

“His service is extremely valuable,” said Dian Peterson, manager of 22nd St. Landing in San Pedro. “We have a limited time out there. Our trips are only 2-2 1/2 hours long during the week and we have a lot of school groups, and they have to get back to the buses, so we don’t have the time to be out there blindly looking for whales.”

Mebust has certainly put in the time--he logs about 300 miles in the air every day, with his windows open, often braving bone-chilling temperatures as he scans the ocean.

“What’s the chill factor with an 80-knot wind and a 50-degree air temperature? That’s what I live in, you know,” he said, on a comparatively balmy day. “There are days when it’s pretty awful, you pretty much got to wear a ski suit to go fly.”

Mebust has spent so much time watching whales over the last six years that he has learned much about the mammal’s behavior. He knows the many routes they prefer inside the Catalina Channel, that they swim at an average of about 4 mph both on their southbound journeys to the breeding and nursing grounds in the Baja California lagoons, and on their return trip to and beyond the Bering Sea.

And that some of whales don’t make it to Baja before giving birth to calves, and that some never make it at all.

“There will be old, old whales that are no longer part of the mating operation or anything--they’re just going because they’re supposed to go, and some of them don’t make it,” Mebust said. “I’ve seen them get here and turn around and join up with another pod heading north. I’ve actually watched that happen.”

Mebust has also watched as whale-watchers on private boats harass the mammals--either intentionally or out of ignorance--in their attempts to get a better look.

He has seen whales attempt to change course to avoid an approaching boater, only to find themselves on a collision course with another boat.

It is mostly this kind of irresponsible behavior on the part of the general public that prompted Mebust to publish a field guide--available at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro--titled, “Gray Whales: A Bird’s-Eye View.”

In one instance, he watched as two people in an inflatable boat, who apparently wanted to touch a whale, tried to position themselves in front of a pod so when the mammals surfaced again they would be right there.

“The whales would have none of it and continually evaded the attacker,” Mebust wrote, in his chapter on harassment. “When the first tactic didn’t work they simply waited for a whale to surface close by and then charged in to attempt a touch. The inflatable drove right over a gray’s head!

“A proper approach to a migrating gray whale by boat should be from the side or rear. . . . The best measure by which to judge a vessel’s intentional approach to a whale is the whale’s reaction. Simply stated: NO THREAT, NO REACTION.”

This way, it is presumed, the whales continue on their course, and the viewer gets to watch the animals up close without bothering them or impeding their journey.

There was no such concern in the first half-hour of Mebust’s recent Saturday morning run. After taking off from Torrance Airport, the voices of skippers immediately began crackling over his radio, requesting his help.

“However many boats I’ve got out there they split the cost for my services,” Mebust said, while scanning the ocean below. “Everybody from San Pedro to Seal Beach. The Marina del Rey boats pay a spotter from the cliff at Point Vicente [on the Palos Verdes Peninsula], but if they don’t have whales inshore, like today, then they call me. So boats don’t pay me unless they’re running a trip.”

While the whales had yet to appear, their smaller cousins began popping up everywhere. Risso’s dolphins, swimming in pods of dozens, looked like small, bluish-white missiles as they cruised erratically beneath the surface.

“Risso’s don’t socialize with whales, but common and bottlenose [dolphins], they’ll go right to them, and especially to a cow and a calf, they really get interested in that, I don’t know why,” Mebust said.

Below, flocks of pelicans, flying in formation, patrolled the surface of the ocean like a miniature air force. Gulls dotted the sea, visible as white specs.

Suddenly, less than a mile off the peninsula, Mebust banked sharply to his right and, with a smile on his bearded face, he pointed to a disturbance below.

Sure enough, four large gray whales emerged from the depths, blowing giant plumes of mist that drifted over the ocean.

It was surprising that mammals so large, almost glowing a greenish color beneath the surface, could surface in so busy an ocean, yet remain out of sight of so many people on so many boats that surrounded them.

Mebust took care of that. He radioed captain Mark Paisano aboard the Islander, which runs out of 22nd Street, with the whales’ location.

Paisano changed course and soon he was cruising alongside the giant cetaceans, which seemed to pay little attention to the camera-clicking crowd at the bow of his boat.

A job well done, Mebust left these whales in search of others. “There are a lot of other trips scheduled today,” he said. “These whales will be [out of range soon]. I’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Jeff Burroughs, a former major league baseball player who coached the Long Beach All-Stars to back-to-back Little League World Series titles in 1992 and ‘93, was facing an entirely different opponent while on a recent trip aboard the San Diego-based Royal Polaris.

Burroughs had hooked into a giant yellowfin tuna on the last of a multiday journey to Mexico’s Revillagigedo Islands, and lost what skipper Frank LoPreste called a genuine “heartbreaker.”

“He hooked a big fish and it almost spooled him immediately at the stern,” LoPreste said. “He got it all the way back and then the fish took him to the bow and spooled him there. We used a backup [another rod and reel hooked to Burroughs’, which was thrown overboard]. It got dark and we pulled the anchor and followed him for an hour. He finally got it to within 50-60 feet of the boat. The fish died, and as we were trying to bring it up, the line broke.”

THE ONE THAT DIDN’T

On the same trip, chartered by Taka Tanaka of Tanaka’s Tackle in Buena Park, angler Corky Yokoe managed to land his monstrous tuna that, if approved by the International Game Fish Assn., will become a line-class world record for 130-pound test line.

Yokoe’s tuna tipped the scale at 376.4 pounds. The current record is a 358.4-pounder. The all-tackle record is a 388.12-pounder. All were caught at the Revillagigedo’s.

TUNA SHOULD HAVE SUCH FRIENDS

Animal rights activists plan to protest the BASS Masters Classic next August at Birmingham, Ala., claiming it is cruel to fish.

“Fish should be able to swim free from pain and suffering,” Tracy Reiman, spokeswoman for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, told the Associated Press. “You wouldn’t put a hook in your cat’s mouth and leave it flopping on the ground.”

Ann Lewis of the Montgomery-based Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, which stages the annual tournament, said fish are not at all like cats. “The first thing you do when you get an aquarium is separate the big fish from the babies,” she said. “The big fish will eat its babies, the neighbor’s babies and even the neighbors. Pets don’t do that.”