Trip Off Baja Began With Hook, Line and Then Ended in Sinking

It has been more than a week since Howard Brust and his son-in-law, Marc Cocova, returned from a fishing trip aboard the Ensenada Special.

But the memories will last a lifetime.

Brust, 50, a sergeant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department stationed in Lynwood, and Cocova, 22, a Navy cook stationed in San Diego, will not soon forget the wide-open bite on yellowtail, which began almost immediately after they left Ensenada.

They can still hear the “thud” that occurred when the 70-foot party boat passed over a floating object, believed to be an abandoned windsurfing craft.

They can still see vividly the panicked looks on the faces of the other passengers as the boat began to take on water, and they will never forget treading water in a sea of debris and floating fish--the day’s catch--for more than an hour after the boat sank, hoping that help would arrive before the sharks.

Brust and Cocova were among 27 passengers and five crew members aboard the Ensenada Special when it struck the object and sank about four miles off the Baja California coast on the foggy morning of Aug. 23.

The boat is a total loss, having come to rest on the bottom in about 150 feet of water. But the passengers were rescued, uninjured, and that’s the important thing, according to Alfonso Susarrey, owner of the Ensenada Sportfishing Center fleet, one of the oldest and most reputable in Baja.

“This is the only boat we have lost in 40 years,” Susarrey said. “But at least nobody was hurt. We gave precedence to the safety of our passengers, they all got life preservers. We had a life raft. . . . Our safety equipment is first-class.”

One of the passengers, who told his story to a Mexican television news crew, had nothing but praise for the captain and crew of the Ensenada Special.

Brust tempered his praise, saying the crew could have acted more quickly after discovering that the boat was sinking.

He said the deckhands put on their life vests before giving any to the passengers and that Cocova, who speaks Spanish, was the one who passed most of them out.

Meanwhile, as the bow began to disappear beneath the surface, panic began to set in.

“Everyone was assembling at the stern,” Brust said. “I went around and made sure a number of passengers had their life jackets on properly, and by now the water at the stern was up to our knees.

“While we were at the stern, there was this one man, a drywall contractor from San Diego, who was with a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old. He came up to me and said, ‘Please help me save my children.’ I told him I was a sheriff’s deputy and that my son-in-law is in the Navy and not to worry, that we would take care of his children, and they ended up doing fine.

“Well, we all get into the water and I notice that Marc is still on the boat, fiddling with his tackle box. The first thing that comes to my mind is that my son-in-law is going to drown because he’s fiddling with his gear.”

It turned out that Cocova’s huge tackle box was actually a military ammunition container that doubles as a flotation device.

“He knew what he was doing after all,” Brust said. “We ended up having five people clinging to that box, including a grandfather and his 13-year-old grandson.”

Others were either aboard or clinging to a raft deployed when the boat went down. Brust said other passengers, as well as some of the crew, were working together to help calm others’ nerves, which wasn’t easy.

“People were screaming, crying and even praying,” Brust said. “It was quite a scene. I’d say there was at least a ton of freshly caught yellowtail, bass and barracuda floating around us. There were big swells, and there were camera cases, tackle boxes and fishing poles banging into us. We all got bruises.

“The coup de grace was this one crew member who could not swim. He was going around putting a death grip on people [fearing that he was going to drown]. The man was bigger than me, but I put a [police] hold on him, took him over and attached him to a piece of debris and he put a death hold on that.”

One of the passengers, not wanting to lose the fish he reeled in as the boat began to sink, used his life jacket to wrap around his catch, which he held onto, treading water, until help arrived.

The Susarreys say that the skipper, Bartolo Jordan, notified port authorities immediately after discovering that his boat was sinking and that rescue vessels began to arrive on the scene within an hour.

Brust says passengers and crew were in the water closer to two hours. In any event, it seemed like an eternity.

“I’ve been in a number of bad situations,” Brust said. “I’ve been in fires, shootings, earthquakes, floods. . . . I’ve been run over by a car. But all of those things happened so fast. This took so long that all sorts of things began to go through my mind.”

Those on the rescue skiff with Brust and Cocova had only one thing on their minds when Cocova, ever the prepared sailor, opened his ammo box. Inside it were homemade tamales, 12 bottles of beer and 12 limes, and a bottle opener.

“We had bonded with all these people, so we broke out the beer and tamales and we had a pretty good time coming back,” Brust said.

On the way home, they stopped at an Ensenada fish market to pick up some fresh fish.

EL NINO FILE

Last week there were reports of dorado being caught off Half Moon Bay. Now there are unconfirmed reports of one of the tropical acrobats, also called mahi-mahi, being caught off Oregon.

The way things are going this summer, anything seems possible.

A small dose of El Nino-related weirdness:

* Philip Friedman of 976-TUNA fame late last week chartered Rick Oefinger’s Del Mar, one of the oldest, slowest and most run-down vessels on the water (not to be confused with the New Del Mar). He came back with reports--and one 26-pound fish for proof--of schools of yellowfin tuna breezing about the outer reaches of Santa Monica Bay.

Skipper Rick Carbajal boated the yellowfin, one of three hooked, about 2 1/2 miles southwest of Point Dume, and proclaimed it--rightly or wrongly--to be the first yellowfin ever landed in the bay.

* Louie Abbott, owner of Harbor Village Sportfishing in Ventura, reports a wide-open marlin bite just beyond Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands. On Tuesday, anglers aboard his six-passenger charter boat, Pacifica, had four hookups and landed two marlin. Striped marlin aren’t rare in the area, but the number of marlin being encountered is.

* Mark Shore of Oxnard Shores on Wednesday caught a two-pound spotted puffer fish while at Santa Cruz Island aboard the Pacific Eagle out of Port Hueneme Sportfishing. Puffers are rare in local waters, but they showed with such frequency during the El Nino summer of 1982 that Fish and Game officials posted signs warning anglers not to eat them because they contain poison and, if not cleaned properly, can be lethal.

* Two men fishing from a small boat Wednesday off Westport, Wash., landed a 104-pound striped marlin, the first ever caught off Washington’s coast.

SHORT CASTS

Dennis Spike recently returned from Baja’s East Cape with the usual catch: tuna, dorado, roosterfish, pargo, jack crevalle--all from a kayak. As owner of Coastal Kayak Fishing in Reseda, Spike, who runs regular local trips, was testing the waters for possible offshore Baja trips. He plans to run two a year and can be reached at (888) 845-2925 or on the Internet at www.kayakfishing.com.

The exotic species of fish in our waters have stolen the spotlight, but exotic whales--blues, humpbacks and minkes--have been thrilling whale-watchers aboard the 88-foot Condor out of Santa Barbara for months. “We’ve seen the blues every day but one--and that was because of bad weather--since May 15,” captain Fred Benko says. Benko can be reached at (805) 965-1985.

Scott Yerby, 26, of Walnut Creek is one lucky surfer. He was attacked recently by a great white shark while straddling his board waiting for a wave at a beach 100 miles south of the Oregon border, but escaped with only moderate injuries to his leg and minor injuries to his hands. “He used his hands to beat it off, so his hands were also injured,” assistant fire chief Dave White told the Contra Costa Times. Doctors removed three shark teeth from Yerby’s knee.