Golden Gator Finds Home Near the Bridge

Al the alligator is fast embarrassing San Francisco Bay-area wildlife officials.

The small gator, first believed to be a figment of the minds of the imaginative tourists who named it “Nessie,” is alive and apparently doing quite well in cool Mountain Lake at the Presidio beneath the Golden Gate Bridge--despite recent efforts to capture it.

City officials say Al, probably someone’s unwanted pet turned loose in the four-acre lake, belongs in a zoo. Meanwhile, Al has turned the lake into a circus.

Gator watchers by the hundreds have been lining the shores of the reservoir, trying to catch a glimpse of the reptile, since the first sighting two weeks ago. A sign at the lake reads, “Gator Lake, home of Al, the vicious, duck-eating alligator.”

But it’s no joke to city, state and federal wildlife experts who had hoped to humanely capture the elusive little beast. They have tried everything from salmon nets to fishing poles.

The tide may soon be turning against Al, however. An expert trapper has been called in from the back bays of Florida. Jim Long, who arrived Monday, claims to have trapped 1,000 alligators in the gator-notorious Everglades. Having never been to California, he agreed to come for an expenses-paid visit to the city for him and his wife.

The San Francisco Chronicle, which has been following the futile efforts of local officials to catch the gator, agreed to pick up the tab, citing a desire to “catch and relocate the alligator as quickly and humanely as possible.”

Long will be out on the lake today. He said he may try to catch the gator by calling him with his “carefully polished” alligator call. Then he may try to snag it and reel it in with his seven-foot “bass-flippin’ ” stick.

In any event, he vows to succeed.

“This is really something, to come all this way for a three-foot alligator,” he told the Chronicle.

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John Bourget of Santa Monica had just returned from a trout-fishing vacation in Oregon, where he was out-fished by his 13-year-old son, Brian, and decided he wanted to get back into his element, the ocean.

So, the two ventured out into the Santa Monica Bay with a local halibut expert, Dave Faxon, and again Brian out-fished his father, catching five legal-sized halibut to Bourget’s two undersized fish, and rubbing it in every chance he got.

“But I changed to a spinning rod and on the next drop I had the bottom of the ocean,” the senior Bourget said.

The bottom eventually began to rise, and after 35 minutes Bourget had at the surface what turned out to be a 50-pound barn-door halibut that has been submitted to the International Game Fish Assn. for world-record consideration for 16-pound test line.

The record is a 45-pound 1-ounce fish also caught in the bay, in the spring of 1989.

Bourget, 58, chairman of the Santa Monica Bay Halibut Derby for the last 10 years, thought his was a large bat ray at first because of the way it just sat on the bottom.

But then it began to fight like a halibut, shaking its head, taking Bourget halfway around Faxon’s boat and back.

Briefly

FISHING--The albacore bite off Central California is back on. Boats are leaving nightly--when weather permits--and most are encountering sizable schools of the popular tuna. Virg’s Landing in Morro Bay reported a count of 437 albacore and three bluefin from July 23 to Aug. 17. The fish are in the 20-pound class but some are pushing 40 pounds.

South of the border, things are getting back to normal for this time of year, with a slight drop in yellowtail and dorado activity but a sharp increase in yellowfin tuna activity. The fish are being caught on San Diego-based boats 40-80 miles south of Point Loma.

Way south of the border, off Cabo San Lucas at the tip of Baja California, a little of everything is biting--blue marlin, striped marlin, tuna and dorado--which is typical for late summer. Most of the activity is happening at the Gordo Banks in the gulf.

MISCELLANY--XTRA 690’s fishing talk show “Let’s Talk Hook-up,” hosted by Pete Gray and Marty Milner, will add the Sunday 6-7 a.m. time slot to its schedule beginning Sunday, meaning it will be aired Saturday and Sunday from 6-8 a.m.