Record Catch Is Worker’s Compensation

If you’re among the many wishing you could quit your job to spend more time enjoying the fun stuff in life, you might appreciate what Don Giberson has done.

Or you might merely think him an irresponsible fool.

Giberson, 43, a longtime Silicon Valley computer sales executive, resigned a few months ago as vice

president to become a full-time recreational fisherman.

“The reality of it is, I felt it was time for a career change, and one of my dreams has been to take time off of work so I could go fishing,” he said. “And earlier this year, there were rumors that this was going to be a great year, so I quit.”

The rumors came to bear fruit--plump and spirited albacore tuna by the hundreds of thousands--and Giberson happily fished away his spring, summer and fall, becoming as much a fixture on the high seas as the gulls that still follow him out of Half Moon Bay practically every morning.

This is a man who last year, while somehow holding down a job, spent $18,000 in fuel alone.

This year he has been reluctant to total his expenses for fear of realizing just how fast he’s going through his savings. “All I know,” he says, “is that my Visa bill tells me I’m spending about $2,800 a month.”

Money well spent? For someone with this kind of money to spend, perhaps. Especially if that person is as obsessed with fishing as Giberson.

He couldn’t have drummed up a better bite in his wildest dreams. Mother Nature, perhaps with an assist from El Nino, has held the seasonal northerlies in check, enabling the surface temperature to warm and the fish to move in closer to shore--between 15-30 miles instead of the usual 80-100.

Thus Giberson, in his 27-foot Grady White, has been in tuna heaven. “I named her Reel Screamer,” he says of his boat, “because if you’ve ever had an albacore hit a [trolled lure] with the clicker on, then you know all about a screaming reel. And my boat does 50 mph, so it is a real screamer.”

Giberson, who lives in Milpitas, on May 31 was among a small group credited with catching the first albacore of the season off Central or Northern California. Since then, he has logged about 60 days on the water and caught 700 albacore and scores of bluefin.

One day stands out above the others, though, a mild midmorning off Santa Cruz 10 days ago, when he went out alone and returned with a 90-pound albacore that, if approved by the International Game Fish Assn., will become the all-tackle world record, replacing the 88-pound 2-ounce longfin caught off Spain’s Canary Islands in 1977.

One of his reels sang loudly above the droning of his engines, indicating a strike. On a bumpy sea, he pumped and reeled and eventually landed a 50-pound albacore. He then caught a smaller fish before turning toward the coast, ready to call it quits.

With six lines out, and with his boat on autopilot, he began to reel them in one by one. Three remained in the water when the big fish struck. Line stripped from the spool so fast Giberson feared he would lose the fish, so he grabbed the wheel with one hand and swung the boat around and gave chase until he was able to regain some line.

He then settled into a classic struggle as anglers on a nearby boat moved in closer to watch.

“The first hour was fun,” Giberson said. “The second hour was, well . . . I was just praying to the fish gods: ‘Please, if you won’t let me get this fish to the boat, at least let me see it before it breaks me off.’ ”

The fish gave out before the line did, Giberson managing to reel it alongside the boat and sink a gaff into its flesh. He pulled it to the stern and up through the transom whereon he breathed a huge sigh of relief.

“To land an albacore that big is itself a feat,” said Bat Batsford, president of the Bay Area Tuna Club. “But to land it, then gaff it, then get it on board without going over the side yourself is spectacular.”

Giberson became an instant celebrity. His fish, caught on 30-pound-test monofilament, also figures to be a line-class world record, beating the 77-pound 2-ounce albacore caught in 1988 off Cape Point, South Africa.

“It’s been phenomenal,” he said of the attention he’s receiving. “I got a call from a buddy in Virginia who said he saw me on CNN. A friend in Palm Springs said he read an article about this fish in the Desert News or whatever. KNBR in San Francisco interviewed me last Saturday and the San Jose Mercury News ran a huge front-page story on me. There must have been no other news that day.”

With the season seemingly winding to a close, Giberson, who is engaged to be married, is eager to get back to work and says he has an interview lined up with a software company that has an opening for an executive position.

“But now that they all know that I’ll quit my job to go fishing, I’m not sure who will hire me,” he said with a laugh. “I guess I set a bad precedent.”

At least he won’t go hungry. “I canned a lot of tuna,” he said.

BIG-MONEY BLUES

The annual Bisbee’s Black and Blue Marlin tournament at Cabo San Lucas last week started with a bang. Chairman Bob Bisbee got the world’s richest billfish tournament going by firing a cannon from the deck of a square-masted pirate ship.

But from there it fizzled. Hundreds of anglers aboard 181 boats managed to land only two blue marlin weighing the necessary 300 pounds or more in three days of competition.

The two successful anglers aren’t complaining, however. Gene Price of Palos Verdes pocketed $757,055 for the biggest fish, a 372-pound blue caught on the third day. Second-place winner Tim Hazlewood of Bay Town, Texas, took home $917,263 for a 355-pound blue caught on the second day. Hazlewood won more money because of a huge jackpot rollover from the first day, when no qualifying fish were caught.

Neither Price nor Hazlewood could be reached for comment, but tournament director Wayne Bisbee was poolside at the Pueblo Rose hotel when word came over the radio that Hazlewood had boated his marlin.

“His wife and some friends were there and she came up to me and asked, ‘What does it mean?’ and I said, ‘Well, it means you can go into town and do some shopping.’ She was ecstatic.”

THE PULL OF THE SEA

Malibu’s Mick Bird has done a little bit of everything: He was a member of the U.S. Air Force Academy Parachute Jump Team, a songwriter and musician, a marathon runner and long-distance bicycle rider.

Now he is rowing a boat around the world. Bird left Fort Bragg, Calif., in a custom-built 28-foot oar-powered vessel Aug. 19 and on Oct. 23 he pulled into Hilo, Hawaii, completing the first leg of a three-year solo journey.

Bird, 40, has no sail and no engine on his craft, which has a small cabin, solar panels for electricity, state-of-the-art electronics for communication and navigation, and a sea anchor for stability in rough weather.

“My partner greeted him in Hawaii and said he looked incredible; he had lost 40 pounds and was solid muscle,” said Frank Westall, a spokesman for Bird’s project and whose Burbank company, Slamsite, is the major sponsor of the endeavor. “He’s been rowing between 12-14 hours a day.”

Bird’s next leg will take him to Australia, with a stopover or two in Micronesia.

Bird’s journey can be traced on the Internet at www.goals.com.

ON THE WILDER SIDE

* In Wyoming, wildlife experts are urging hunters to carry bear repellent, after a recent rash of encounters resulting in the shooting deaths of five grizzlies by hunting guides over a two-week span.

Wyoming Game and Fish Department officials say the killing of the grizzlies is a setback to the recovery of the threatened species, and unnecessary.

“In dozens of human-grizzly encounters in the last 15 years in the Yellowstone area, only once has a grizzly bear come through the spray and knocked down or injured the sprayer,” biologist Dave Moody said. “The spray has repelled the bear and protected the person 99% of the time.”

Perhaps, but you can bet that hunters and guides feel much safer looking down the barrel of a rifle at a roaring grizzly than they do the top of a plastic spray container.

* In Hawaii, popular bodyboarder Mike Coots is resting in fair condition at a Kauai hospital after a shark bit off the lower portion of his right leg Tuesday morning while he was waiting for a set of waves 150 yards from shore.

Surfer Reggie DeRoos, lying on his board only 15 feet away, witnessed the attack. “It was five or six seconds, then it was over,” DeRoos told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. “He got on his [bodyboard] and popped his leg up. There was no foot. It was severed at his calf muscle.”

Coots, 18, somehow paddled to shore on his own and later apologized to the staff at Wilcox Hospital in Lihue for “getting sand all over.”

The shark was not identified, but Coots said its head was about two feet wide, so it was probably a tiger shark.

The state said it has no plans to hunt the shark, but don’t be too sure. The last thing it wants is another attack or two, which might set off a panic last seen about five years ago, when a series of tiger shark attacks--some of them fatal--generated an islands-wide shark scare that resulted in a state-sponsored hunt that removed dozens of large tiger sharks.