Fish Stories in Search of Heroes

Funny what we come to tolerate, and what gets us mad.

Millionaire professionals crowd the field at the Olympics, an event that once exalted the amateur athlete with more heart than wallet. That, we cheer.

Poachers take to the woods and the range with helicopters and AK-47s and infrared scopes, mowing down elk and deer and bear like a combine takes down wheat. Veal calves are boxed up like Whitman’s chocolates, and high-tech whalers still harpoon and flense the creatures as profligately as if we still burned their oil in our lamps. That we put up with.

And then, over the weekend, a Redondo Beach contractor named Barry Andersen is practicing for a shark-fishing tournament. He drops a 30-pound-test line 17 miles out in the San Pedro Channel and hooks a record-breaking mako shark. A mako is an oceangoing wolverine, a fish with as much heft and fight as a Harley Davidson, and teeth like the window display at Ross Cutlery.

Andersen battles it for 2 1/2 hours, brings it alongside his boat, gaffs it, finally shoots it a dozen times with a .357 magnum. It took another two hours to haul it back to Redondo Beach and a hero’s welcome.

And that got people crabbing about good sportsmanship.

*

Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. . . . But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. . . . I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?

--”The Old Man and the Sea”

*

For the landlocked among us, it sure sounded unsporting. A dozen shots? That fish must have been sushi. My father carried a .25 revolver on our fishing trips, in case a human went berserk. But a .357 magnum? O.J. had a .357 in the white Bronco. The new bulletproof windows at Figueroa Street Elementary School are strong enough to deflect a bullet from a .357.

And--this really galled--Andersen reloaded. Who reloads? The guy at McDonald’s in Chula Vista, the man on the Long Island Railroad car--they reload.

But here is the truth of it: this catch was not only for the books, it was by the book.

On a 30-pound-test line, Andersen happened to snag a 740-pound fish a third as long as his boat. The feat of bringing it in was like hoisting an anvil with twine. When he finally got the shark alongside, he took a good look at it and told his 8-year-old son, Chase, to get back and hide. Then he gaffed it, and shot it. Subduing a good-sized shark usually takes two shots. This one took six, and then six more.

Andersen is a responsible fisherman, a tag-and-release kind of angler who eats what he keeps. But this week, somewhere back of the cheers and the backslapping and the clinking of festive glasses, Andersen began hearing the complaints: “ ‘My God, these killers went out there and shot this fish.’ ” He sounds plaintive, a man who wants to be understood. “You have to shoot them. There’s no way to do it otherwise.”

Shark fisherman carry guns. A big fish--a 100-pound mako or a 200-pound Alaskan halibut--can thrash about and break a man’s legs, not to mention his boat. Shoot it too soon, and not only is it unsporting, it’s prodigal--the fish sinks. Shoot too late, and you may shoot a hole in the boat, too.

Andersen’s catch passed state Fish and Game muster: hook a shark with a rod and reel, have it under your control, and beyond the three-mile limit, you can shoot it legally. You just can’t pick up a rifle and go plinking fish.

Andersen was about the same age as his son when he began fishing and hunting in New York.

He gave up the hunting. He had no stomach for it, and went to bed feeling wretched and guilty at night. “I’m not a hunter. I’ve got a problem going out and shooting a deer, but a fish I feel different about.”

*

Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.

The early, fogged silence of the Redondo Beach pier, before even the in-line skaters arrive, is a thing broken only by the lolling of buoys and the muffled joshing of men like Stanley and Eddie and Fred, who can pass the time even if the plastic bucket stays empty.

There are those who would prefer that fish not be caught or eaten at all, that lines and nets not be dropped into the criminally overfished green-slate waters. And there are biologists who prefer fishermen to leave the big ones out there, that the rule about not catching anything under such a size would have a corollary for fish over such a size, to ensure that there are some leviathans still out there.

“Fish,” the old man said. “Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?”

And the old man took up his radio in his dry brown hand and called in an air strike.