Complete Anglers : Die-Hards Fish Till Dawn in a Brotherhood Forged by Cold, Tempered by Patience

The sun had fallen behind a heavy bank of clouds and a chill breeze whipped in from the ocean. Mike Pyon, a fishing pole in hand, stood in the darkness at the end of Redondo Pier, shivering.

So far, he hadn’t caught so much as a decent sunset.

“I ain’t catching anything,” the 18-year-old Los Angeles resident grumbled. The only apparent source of warmth for Pyon, who was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, was the cigarette clamped between his lips. How was his night going?

“Coooooold!”

So it goes in June, night fishing at one of the seven piers dotting the Los Angeles coastline. And yet they come anyway, a regular tide of youngsters, old men, a few working professionals but mostly immigrants and blue-collar guys. On any given evening, several hundred anglers take to the local waters, invading not just the piers, but also commercial sportfishing boats and the slippery rocks of harbor breakwaters.

For many, the outings are sport; others leave behind that age-old disclaimer--”Gone fishin’ “--as a ritual part of their lives, a way to feed their families. Toting buckets and tackle boxes, poles and parkas, they come for the mackerel and shark that feed nocturnally along the California coastal shelf. Die-hards among them--men like Carlos Lozano, 20, a sanitation worker living in Lennox--show up in the afternoon, when the bonito and halibut are biting, and go all the way through until dawn.

“I stay for the shark,” Lozano said in halting English, reporting that on some magical nights, the sharks are “bigger than my size.”

Never mind that he is but 5-foot-2.

On this night, Lozano is one of about 40 fishermen--most of them in heavy jackets--who have strung themselves along the Redondo Pier railing under the dusky orange glow of pier lights. Despite the bone-chilling cold and dark overcast, this was a picturesque place to be: Neon signs reading “TONY’S,” “EL TORITO” glowed against the sky; the sea was choppy and nearly black. To the north and south, the lights of the coastline danced with dazzling brightness on the water.

Only problem was, the mackerel seemed to be sleeping. No one was landing much of anything except for Danny Kim, a 17-year-old from Harbor City who had caught nine fish, none longer than 10 inches.

But suddenly, Young Soo Park, 29, one of the regulars from Los Angeles, hooked something that bowed his pole in a promising arc. Quickly, Park drew up his line and out of the water came a crab--no, not just a crab, a crab that appeared to be the mother of all crabs: a monstrous, gangly creature at least 2 1/2 feet across.

“Hold on!” someone said.

It dangled, spider-like, near the pilings while a bystander ran to the nearby bait shop for a crab net. The net was on its way as Park got the crab up near the rail--and his line broke.

The crab plummeted into the black water.

“That was a huge crab!” shouted Kam Bhogal, another angler looking on.

Park paced rapidly in circles, like a barefoot man on scorching sand, and muttered furiously in Korean.

“Aaaaaagh!” he said.

“He’ll be talking about that for a month,” someone else said, grinning.

The pier had come alive. Park’s crab--the big one that got away--dominated conversation in English, Spanish and Asian languages, all at once.

“Huge!” someone exclaimed. “Huge claws!”

“A spider crab,” nodded veteran night fisherman Thomas Rutkowski, 25, of Redondo Beach. “Oh, yes, you can eat ‘em.”

Rutkowski is here three, four times a week. “Sometimes till morning,” he said, talking about how peaceful it is at Redondo--no noise, no gang problems. “It’s a getaway from the woman type of thing,” he said with a laugh, adding: “At least here, all the fish you catch you can eat. I catch a fish in Santa Monica, I throw it right back.”

His claim--that these Redondo fish are uncontaminated by pollutants--is far from being the consensus, however. In fact, the Redondo Pier is a bridge over long-troubled waters, sharing heavily polluted Santa Monica Bay with piers at Malibu, Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach.

These days, according to marine scientists, the water quality of the bay is better than any time in recent memory, but the improvement is perhaps most dramatic at the north end. Los Angeles’ huge Hyperion sewage treatment plant in Playa del Rey no longer dumps sewage solids, or sludge, into the bay and has significantly improved the quality of its treated waste water under pressure from environmental groups and federal regulators, said Mark Gold, a scientist for Heal the Bay.

But a second sewage outfall on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, operated by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, has fought pressure to improve its discharge and is now considered the “worst” source of sewage pollutants in California, Gold said. Not only that, he said, but the county outfall continues to release trace amounts of DDT and PCBs, two carcinogens that were banned years ago but linger in the sewer lines.

Those pollutants are known to contaminate two kinds of bottom-dwelling fish, white croaker and dover sole, and scientists and fishermen alike speculate about whether--or which--other marine species are contaminated.

Mike Jypsy Adams, 30, of Rancho Palos Verdes sat with his fishing line in the water and pointed to a weather-corroded sign with a skull and crossbones: “DANGER: Puffer Fish . . . Can Be Fatal If Eaten.” A sign elsewhere warned of dangerous levels of pollution in marine mussels.

“I wouldn’t eat the fish in these waters,” Adams said, blaming contamination for what he called a major decline in the size of the catch at Southern California piers.

Still, late at night on a pier, you see a rare sight in Los Angeles: Men and women of all ages, all races--black, Anglo, Asian, Latino, Indian--standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

Vicente Capacite, 60, who was raised in the Philippines, is here just about every night, trolling for food for his family. With a ball cap jutting out from beneath his parka hood, his unshaven face sporting a nearly toothless grin, this grizzled old man of the sea was suffering with the flu.

He talked of quitting for the night, but he held on, ever hopeful.

“I catch more at nighttime,” he said hoarsely.

So far, though, the night had brought only three measly mackerel.

As midnight approached, the offshore wind died slightly, and the overcast broke up into patchy white clouds. Here and there, a mackerel came in, flopping on the deck. No one appeared to be leaving.

Lozano, the Lennox shark fishermen, reeled in an 18-inch shovelnose, but it was too small to keep; he threw it back.

Park, surrounded by a cluster of family members, was at the rail, gesturing and talking in Korean, retelling the saga of his crab.

“Aaaaaagh!” he repeated.

Facing directly out to sea, Salvadoran immigrant Jose Dominguez, 37, recalled the many times his father took him fishing years ago in his homeland. Now, here he stood--accompanied by his wife, Miriam, his 10-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter--testing new waters, a whole new life.

He grinned, told stories of the yellowtail he used to catch, of his father and his father’s boat, until it was very late. “No fish tonight,” he finally whispered to his daughter, lifting her in his arms.

She pointed overhead. “Looky, Daddy.”

Dominguez looked up at the broken clouds. “A star.”