Facing the issues as things warm up
Could someone drop a global warming pill in the Pacific Ocean or at least find some bubbling crude easy to get at and close to home? We need good news and we need it fast. The past few years have been a perfect storm of troubles for the local sportfishing scene -- bad economy, high gas prices, cold water, few fish and absurd regulatory and permanent fishing closures.

Fish would really help. Fitful catches of Coronado Island's yellowtail and tub seabass skewered by spearfishermen along the beach are okay. So is the good rockfishing at the islands and the stray seabass caught at Santa Rosa and along the beach.

But desperate times call for some major despair on the part of lots and lots of yellowtail, albacore, bluefin tuna, sand bass and barracuda. We need swift justice and it's not that we don't believe in conservation, it's just time that folks like us got a break. You don't end a drought with a couple sprinkles or even a week of drenching rains. You need a solid series of storms like we had this winter.

And make no mistake, we are in the midst of a fish drought. Leon Todd of Tackle Specialties (Calstar Rods) was the first person I ever heard use that word. A walking history book when it comes to the Southern California tackle business, Todd was talking about the mid-1960s, a period he noted as one of the worst when it came to fishing showing up in the Southern California Bight. Many others have followed over the years. Stinky red tides. Lizard fish instead of sand bass. Are the fish gone, did we catch them all? Are we finally just dumping too much of human effluent into our coastal waters?

We have better boats and better electronics and skippers I respect say that even during the short time the water was warm last summer and sand bass fishing was good, the balls of spawning sand bass on the flats that showed on the meter were smaller than in years past. Have we overfished them?

I know for a fact there has been much less pressure lately -- less licenses sold, boats tied to the dock more often. Less money in the wallet all the way around. And, as I said, less fish as a whole.

Yet lots of rockfish species have thrived in the cold waters and a source told me he hit a local rockpile above Long Beach and it had been taken over by a school of big copper rockfish (aka chuckleheads or white bellies).

The truth is climate shifts, environmental degradation and overfishing have an impact on species, yet it's also true it's very hard to make a species of fish extinct. I'm not talking about the Los Angeles River goby or any other isolated subspecies. I mean fish that spawn in the tens of thousands and number in the millions and swim the globe. I'm not saying we can't do it. Man is capable of screwing anything up.

It's just that we tend to think too much of ourselves and in so doing place a microscope on time. Our time is short and that means to us "timing" is the most important thing. We can do damage that will last longer than humans have occupied North America, but that barely makes it beyond the last ice age -- a little climate event we've been adjusting to ever since.

Just looking at it from a natural standpoint, geology and the booming human population are bound to collide in a manner that will make the recent disasters, as horrible as they were, seem miniscule in comparison. Anyone who thinks different probably thinks a peripheral canal is going to the save the Delta and solve California's water problems at the same time. Might as well believe California's $15 billion budget deficit is going to go away now that the flow of illegal immigrants has been slowed to a trickle.

But I stray. My point is we are mightily impressed with our scientific and technological accomplishments of the last couple centuries, but what have we done that matches the upthrust scarp of the Eastern Sierra or the ice worn valley of Yosemite? On U.S. 395 just north of Lone Pine there is a sign marking the graves of the 1862 earthquake victims. Did you know the dramatic elevation change from the Owens Valley floor to the summit of Mt. Whitney is as much a function of the valley sinking as the granite lifting up. They say that in that quake the valley floor dropped as much as 12 feet in a matter of seconds -- a fraction of time not even measurable in reference to the billions of years that make up geological time. To those poor souls that had the walls cave in on them during the temblor it was the end of time on Earth.

When San Francisco placed a dam across the Hetch Hetchy Valley, it wasn't a dozen or even thousands of lives erased, it was a natural life history that developed from the beginning of time. It's from this perspective that the environmentalists behind the Marine Life Protection Act want to set aside pristine sections of the coast to be preserved, a laudable notion. Unfortunately, all they have managed to do is stop people from fishing. Which on its face is ridiculous, since fishing is the most easily regulated threat to the marine environment and you could preserve the entire life history with modern management techniques. But have you ever tried to stop shit from flowing downhill?

There needs to be a true vision beyond snapshot preservation, a way to gain harmony with nature beyond putting cloth sacks of groceries into the back of a Prius. A way to preserve the American ideals of every man and woman being able to work hard and secure a place in this world that does not at the same time destroy it.

Meanwhile, if you build your house next to the ocean or in an ancient waterway, don't be surprised if the water comes back to claim its own. You can call it global warming if you want, but it's really the other name for nature -- inevitable.

Luckily, the newly announced offshore and inland salmon seasons in California show that even highly stressed populations can make a comeback. Our migratory pelagic species will be back again someday, too. How many and how soon is anyone's guess. Here's one vote for lots of fish, really soon.

So get your tackle ready and if you want to find out more about how the Department of Fish and Game feels about the fisheries and wildlife issues on the table in California, I found this interesting link to the department's official "White Pages" on the Fish and Game Commission site:Click Here. The discussions range from the dwindling scientific branch of the DFG to the decaying trout hatchery infrastructure. I found the piece on hunting in California the most enlightening. In it the department advocates hunting as both a necessary management tool and funding mechanism. What's the department going to do when their actions make fishing licenses go away and the state's share of excise taxes on the sale of tackle and boats shrinks?

Okay, I've vented. Call it a spring cleaning.PHOTOTHE PERFECT STORM?This is a shot of a stalled out storm system in Mississippi last week. That's the Mississippi State football stadium on the right. The shot was pulled from the MSU website.

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