Bass on the comeback trail

The white sea bass is not a gorgeous fish. It isn’t really white, and

it doesn’t look very friendly. It is given to skulking in shady spaces

and has a somewhat sullen temperament.

But when John Lauritzen talks about white sea bass, he does so with an

affectionate tone. That’s because he’s the father figure for thousands of

the fish that are held in a barge in Newport Harbor.

It’s a facility belonging to the Pacific Fisheries Enhancement

Foundation, an organization affiliated with the Balboa Angling Club

that’s working to repopulate the ocean with the once-scarce bass. Their

effort, anglers say, is starting to make real improvements on the bass

scene.

On the barge on a recent afternoon, Lauritzen dipped a mesh scoop into

one of four large fiberglass holding tanks, thrusting it deep into the

murky corners where his charges like to congregate.

A moment later, he came up with a scoop of thrashing bass, a handful

of about 1,200 that are currently being raised on the facility.

“We raise them from smelt,” said the 32-year-old volunteer director of

the foundation, who works on computer network security for a living. The

process of allowing the fish to grow large enough to release into the

wild can take anywhere from five to more than eight months, he said,

depending on water conditions.

When they’re old enough to survive on their own, the fish are dumped

into the wild: free to swim about blissfully or find their way onto the

gleaming point of an angler’s hook, as the case may be.

Lauritzen can’t control the fate of his fish; he can only raise them

right and send them out into the world.

There are 10 bass-raising barges on the California coast south of

Point Conception, part of a project called Ocean Resources Enhancement

and Hatchery Program. The 18-year-old program combines state funding with

volunteer efforts like Lauritzen’s to boost the bass population. All

together, the statewide project puts about 100,000 fish into the water

annually.

And it seems to be making a difference. Since the early 1980s, when

white sea bass had been overfished to such a degree that they had become

a scarce catch, they have gradually returned to a prominent place on the

angling radar.

John Doughty, who runs J.D.’s Big Game Tackle in Newport Beach, says

that in recent years he’s seen a definite improvement in bass catches.

“It’s a combination of that [program] and the reduction of the gill

net fishing along the coastline that’s really allowed the coastal waters

all the way from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border to improve,” he

said.

And in years ahead, as many of the released bass finally grow large

enough to be legal catches, he expects things to get even better.

As for Lauritzen, he raises the fish but doesn’t really enjoy eating

them. It’s tough to go from the position of a caring father to that of

the chomping seafood diner.

“It would be kind of like eating your hamsters,” he said.