Web Across the Currents

By Howard Hall

"A hammerhead dies in the net" ©Howard Hall

On a calm foggy night in October hundreds of blue sharks, thresher sharks, swordfish and other great fish swam north and south on courses which would take them between Anacapa and Santa Cruz Islands. They were among the ocean's elite predators, often ranging thousands of miles through the trackless nocturnal void of open sea. But unlike countless other dark nights when these animals followed routes through the California Channel Islands, tonight a trap had been set.

    Our radar revealed that sixteen fishermen had set their nets in the four mile pass between Anacapa and Santa Cruz. Although fishermen have been using nets since before recorded history, these nets were new and different. Each was one mile long and nearly one hundred feet high. Unlike most gill nets, these were not anchored to the bottom but were adrift in the open sea. They are called drift gill nets and since 1978 when their use was first introduced in California, they have proven highly efficient in the capture of two prized food fishes: the swordfish and the thresher shark. The introduction of this new fishing technology has added fuel to a raging controversy between environmentalists, sport fishermen, and commercial fishermen over the use of all gill nets to exploit California's fishery resources.

    Dawn was only three hours away. We searched the darkness just a few yards off our bow for the buoy that marked this end of the net. One mile, distant the deck lights of the fishing boat were just visible through the lifting fog. Finally, Tom Campbell located the buoy with his dive light and David Weiss and I slipped into the water. David would record the numbers and species of fish we found in the net and I would film them. Tom would follow as a safety diver to help should one of us become ensnared. When I reached the buoy I shined my light down the line that tethered it to the net. The line disappeared into the darkness.

    I've never felt entirely comfortable dropping into ink black water, at night, in the open ocean, with the bottom thousands of feet below. With my camera, movie lights, and batteries, I felt a bit out of control as the weight of my equipment pulled me down at a slow but accelerating velocity. I felt as if I might continue to fall even after pressing the inflation button on my buoyancy jacket to neutralize my negative buoyancy. But at thirty feet the beam of my light encountered the top of the net giving my eyes and mind a welcome object to focus on. I leveled off at sixty feet and after being joined by Tom and David, began swimming the length of the net.

    Since the net was drifting free it hadn't maintained a straight rectangular configuration. It was convoluted - bending, twisting, and even folding back upon itself. With only the ten foot beams of our lights to see by, it was easy to get lost within the folds or find oneself separated from the surface by seemingly endless panels of net. If we touched the net, it would grasp us like the web of a spider.

    Once David turned away from a fold in the net and the buckle of his right fin brushed the mesh and caught. Instinctively, David pulled to free himself, but in an environment influenced little by gravity, this only succeeded in pulling him further into the net. Tom came quickly to David's aide and after a few minutes of very careful work David was free. Alone, he might have drowned.

"Another Blue Shark dies in the net" ©Howard Hall

   Something white reflected the beam of my light ahead. With a few more strokes of my fins I could see that it was a blue shark wrapped in the net. Three yards further on was another blue shark and yet another a few yards beyond that. David would count thirty-two blue sharks in the net that night and we swam less than half its length.

    Blue sharks have no commercial value. Drift nets are set for swordfish and thresher shark. But unfortunately the nets kill non-commercial species just as efficiently as they kill commercial ones. Most blue sharks caught in the net die of suffocation and exhaustion during the night. But those that survive to be pulled at dawn are often killed by the fishermen to facilitate their removal from the net and to insure that they don't foul the net in the future.

    Descending past the fifteenth blue shark we encountered, the beam of my light found a swordfish. It was a magnificent creature nearly twelve feet in length, perhaps weighing a thousand pounds. Its sword was nearly five feet long and had edges as sharp as a scythe. It had been a powerful and intelligent fish and I tried to imagine it accelerating through the darkness trailing a green comet's tail of bioluminescence; rushing into a school of mackerel; using the sword to strike them down before turning to eat them.

    But like blue sharks and other pelagic fish, swordfish are incapable of swimming backwards. In an open ocean environment these animals have no natural need for this ability. So upon encountering the net, the swordfish rushed forward against its bonds, slashing its unseen foe with its sword and expending its dying efforts driving itself deeper and deeper into the nylon mesh until it was hopelessly ensnared.

    As I filmed the swordfish, I could feel Tom's hand on my shoulder and I could tell something was making him nervous. So after finishing the sequence, I turned to see what was bothering him. He pointed the beam of his flashlight into the black water behind us and made a pantomime of biting jaws with his hand. I immediately understood what the problem was. The net was not just a passive trap. Once the first caught animals began to struggle against the mesh, the net began to actively attract prey. In the darkness Tom was seeing sharks. Fortunately, operating an underwater movie camera demands full concentration leaving me little time to worry about the possibility of being eaten. I left that problem to Tom's skill as a safety diver and to his good judgment.

    Before ascending we encountered a variety of other species including two hammerhead sharks, three thresher sharks, a sea lion, and a manta ray. I think the sea lion bothered David and Tom most of all. People naturally feel a greater kinship with a warm blooded animal than with the cold blooded fish. But it was the sight of a manta ray trying to fly free of the web that really struck me. It was the first manta ray I had ever seen in California waters, but in the Sea of Cortez a manta had once permitted and even encouraged me to ride on its back as it circled the Marisula Seamount. It had been my finest hour underwater. So I was deeply saddened to see this lovely creature so ensnared.

   On that night, the fisherman did well. His net produced four swordfish and six thresher sharks. But for every fish that went into the fisherman's ice hold, many more were thrown back to the sea as waste. At dawn, as the net was being pulled, we watched from beneath the fishing boat as dozens of blue sharks rained down, followed by the sea lion and the last lifeless glide of the manta ray as it spiraled toward the ocean floor thousands of feet below.

   For those of us who dive and enjoy the submarine environment for its aesthetic value, there is something dreadfully wrong with this kind of wasteful killing. But defining the problem and placing blame is not easy. Superficially it would seem that the fishermen are obvious villains. But the fishermen may be the last to blame. They are trapped by the laws of economics. They are obliged to use the most efficient means of catching fish available. If they don't use the drift net in favor of more primitive fishing methods, they can't compete and may go bankrupt forfeiting their boats and the treasured freedom of life on the sea.

    Until 1978 when the drift gill net was introduced, swordfish were taken by harpoon. This was a highly selective form of fishing and insured that only swordfish were taken and in only adult sizes. But when the drift net was introduced, harpooners began catching less fish, the price of swordfish went down due to the increased supply by the nets, and the harpooners (who fervently hated the nets) were forced to give up their way of life or put nets on their boats.

    Tom Brown is a professional fisherman who made his living hunting swordfish with a harpoon. He remembers many years when he killed more than two hundred fish. 1978, the year the drift net was introduced in California, Brown had a good season. The following year, however, he took less than ten percent of his average and bitterly held the drift net responsible. In 1983 less than 500 of the 20,000 swordfish taken in California were taken by harpooners. The rest were taken by drift nets.

    Today Brown goes to sea with a drift net instead of a harpoon. You might ask yourself what you would have done when faced with the loss of your boat and livelihood. Some fishermen walked away from a lifestyle passed down through generations. Others went to the nets.

"A gray whale dies in a drift net" - ©Howard Hall

   There are two issues at question over the use of gill nets. One regards the health of marine life populations. According to Dennis Bedford of the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) there are now over two hundred and thirty permits in California allowing the use of the drift net. During any good night at the peak of the season there could be more than one hundred miles of net cast in the paths of California's open ocean marine wildlife. Most of these animals are predators that occupy the top of the food chain, exist in more limited number than lower species and may procreate very slowly.

    Bedford believes that the drift net fishery may have already had a significant impact on the thresher shark population. The DFG's current study of drift net catch statistics suggests that thresher numbers are rapidly declining due to the effectiveness of the nets combined with their slow reproductive rates. But gaining an understanding of the population dynamics of a pelagic species is not easy. Yearly changes in the water temperatures and current patterns greatly influence the movements of open ocean predators. It is difficult to prove that a drop in the catch of a species is the result of overfishing when it could be said that the population is simply elsewhere that year. Studying these populations takes years and is very expensive. But Rob Collins, another DFG official, says that the California Department of Fish and Game has only enough funds to respond to crisis situations. "We have enough money to fight fires, but not enough to prevent them."

    The other issue is moral. Can the incidental death of non-commercial species on such a large scale be justified? Is it wrong to kill dolphins in nets but all right to kill tens of thousands of blue sharks? Should we be concerned with the decimation of a fish population if the species is not yet endangered and the fish has no commercial value?

    The drift gill net is but one of many kinds of gill nets being used along the California Coast. Some are anchored in deep water for rockfish, others are set in shallow water for halibut or white seabass. The fisherman sets his net with a specific target fish in mind. But there is usually an "incidental" catch of unwanted animals which may include seals, dolphins, diving birds, and even whales. During one expedition, I dived eight inshore (anchored) nets. The fishermen had been very unlucky. In all eight nets I saw a total of three marketable fish. But the incidental species had been even less lucky. In one net alone I saw nearly one hundred bat rays, yet not one marketable fish. When the fishing boat left for better fishing grounds the bat rays had been returned to the sea - lifeless effigies of creatures once capable of submarine flight.

    In recent years I have dived in the waters of Japan and the Philippines and have witnessed the horrifying effects of overfishing coastal waters. We are very fortunate in California. Although the giant black seabass, the white seabass, and several other beautiful species I remember seeing often two decades ago are essentially absent from these waters today, it remains a bountiful and healthy environment. Yet with the astronomical growth in the demand for seafood and the proliferation of gill nets and other advanced fishing technologies, I fear I may live to see the day when our marine wilderness is a lifeless shadow of its former majesty.

    Hanging over the abyss that night, staring into the nearly lifeless eye of that great swordfish, I felt anger. I wanted to hold somebody responsible for the destruction of this great fish, the manta ray, the sea lion, and the dozens of graceful blue sharks the net had caught. But while swimming back to our boat, I realized that some, if not most of the responsibility must certainly be placed on the shoulders of we who sit down at a restaurant and order swordfish steak, or fillet of seabass, or broiled halibut, or thresher shark. We must remember that these animals are not grown on a farm or raised on a ranch. When eating seafood, most of the time we are eating wildlife. And in doing so we ourselves participate in casting the net.