Fisherman Casts a Big Net, but It’s for Small Fry Only

Larry Derr fishes just about every night, but the big ones always get away. Every so often he hauls in a good-sized bat ray or halibut or tomcod, but even then he just throws it back.

He’s looking for something smaller.

His is a nonsense job: fishing for bait. The name emblazoned on the bow of his 43-foot drum seiner just about says it all: In-Seine. It is wet, gritty work, too downright obscure to even call it unglamorous. Few commodities on Earth are more base or taken for granted than fish bait.

Because his quarry shuns the daylight--its movements are influenced by light and tides and plankton and water temperature--Derr lives nocturnally. He goes out at midnight or 2 or 3 in the morning, plying the swells of Santa Monica Bay for anchovies and sardines and selling them at dawn at a row of eight receiving tanks built into his boat dock in Marina del Rey.

At the otherwise deserted marina on a recent night, preparing for another run, there are simple rituals to perform: He runs a hose into the seiner’s huge metal holding tank, warms the diesel engine and dons his boots and an orange waterproof slicker. For the last few nights, the catch has been poor. He is glad for tonight’s cloud cover; a luminous overcast blocks the moon, creating a darkness favorable to finding bait.

“It’s a tough racket,” Derr says. “It’s always tough in the fishing business, period. Most of us, we’re crazy to be in it.”

The seiner, built like a tug--stout up front with a broad rear deck--is a smaller version of the heavy-volume commercial boats that run out of San Pedro. The seine is a massive net--Derr’s is 600 feet long and 132 feet deep--deployed from a motorized drum. Rigged with floats and weights, the net hangs underwater like an invisible curtain. The trick is to find the fish on sonar, lay the seine in a circle around them, and draw it closed.

Derr, 43, paid $190,000 for the boat when he got serious about bait fishing five years ago. A native of Playa del Rey, he grew up around these waters but took a desultory course to this livelihood. He attended several colleges, came up nine units short of a business degree and spent time as a computer technician before deciding to fish full time in 1986. He hunted sheepshead and tuna and toiled a few years long-lining sharks. The move to bait occurred for reasons of cold economics: He saw a demand for it.

Live bait can return a six-figure income to a fisherman with the savvy and stamina to keep up the search.

“There’s always going to be a need for bait,” says Derr, who has a lean, leathery look; under a dark baseball cap, he looks a little like Richard Gere.

As the seiner rumbles out past the breakwater, Derr handles the wheel on the top deck alongside his lone crewman, Todd Taylor, 28, a former customer who hitched on three years ago. Together they scan the surface and study the bright patterns of a sonar screen, hints of anchovies or sardines below.

“Right here, Larry!” Taylor calls out. He scampers down the ladder to the rear deck, preparing to unspool the seine from its enormous drum. Derr throttles back and begins circling.

The swells are gentle, with a mild breeze out of the south. The lights of Santa Monica and Palos Verdes frame the long expanse of shoreline.

Derr tightens his circle, the diesel roar the only sound. Then abruptly the sonar goes blue.

The fish have vanished.

“Moving too fast,” Derr says.

*

A dozen or so small-time bait operators dot the coastline from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Many, like Derr, reap anchovies in the late spring and early summer, squid in the winter and sardines all year round. Much of the haul is sold, at $20 a scoop, to recreational boaters who pull alongside the docks to fill bait tanks, coolers and plastic barrels.

The bait trade extends well beyond the work of seiners like Derr, however. Bait comes in surprising varieties from any number of sources. There are commercial bait hunters who comb the beaches in search of sand crabs and mussels, for example. There are nationwide networks of bait catchers and dealers.

Each bait has its own targets. Ghost shrimp are used to catch bass, corvina, halibut, perch, shovelnose sharks, yellowfin croakers and bat rays. Bloodworms, popular among surf fishermen, also catch corvina and croakers. Frozen anchovies are used largely by pier fishermen and “rock hoppers”--those who fish from the breakwaters--to catch halibut, bass, mackerel, barracuda and bonito. Squid are used for bass and rock fish.

Bait moves through its channels of commerce in huge volumes. On a busy day, 6 tons may pass through the New Fishall Bait Co., a frozen-bait distributor in Gardena, says owner Kent Williams. The firm turns out 300,000 one-pound bags of its top seller, anchovies, every year. Nearly half of that, says Williams, is trucked to inland lakes as far as Phoenix and Sacramento, for use in catching stripers and salmon.

*

Derr has been hurt while fishing. Once, in his first boat, he fell through an open hatch and broke four ribs. He lost his shark line on one occasion when a submarine ran beneath him. He is “a lousy daytime sleeper” and struggles with fatigue.

Yet on the whole, the ocean suits him. He makes a comfortable living for his wife and two young girls.

“I’m my own boss,” he says. “I enjoy the water. Daniel Boone is my real cousin--it’s in my blood, so to say. If I can work with it, enjoy what I do, that’s important.”

The seiner plows toward the runways of Los Angeles International Airport. It is 2 a.m. Two pelicans appear in silhouette against the lighted clouds.

“All right, birds,” Derr implores, “find us some fish.”

Suddenly, one dives for the surface. Derr perks up--”Ah, there it is!”--and angles for the spot. In moments the sonar displays a familiar pattern below: sardines. A lot of them.

Taylor rushes back to the drum. The net goes out. Derr makes his circle and a winch begins drawing the seine closed.

An arc light illuminates the lower deck as Derr leaves the wheel and hurries to join Taylor below. The work is similar to that of larger commercial seiners, except for the need to keep the catch alive.

When the net is nearly in, and the fish are bunched at the side of the boat, Derr and Taylor use their long-handled scoops to move the fish manually into the hold, rather than pump them through tubes by machine. A sharp fish odor hangs on the air as they briskly bend and reach, stowing their haul of several thousand fish.

At 2:20 a.m. they roll up the last of the net. Heading back to the docks, before leaving again to hunt another load, there is time to consider the night stillness, the red tides when the bait flashes in front of the boat in a fireball.

“The sunrise is beautiful,” Derr says. Coming in at 5 or 6 a.m., after a long night of bait fishing, he can smell the toast in the homes fronting the marina. “You’d think you were in a restaurant.”