off the pavement / By Japhet Weeks

Straining Water

Why the local beach fishing industry has shrunk to smelt-sized proportions

(May 8, 2008)  On a recent Sunday evening, Mike Zamboni’s old Toyota truck grumbles noisily down the pot-holed dirt road that winds through Redwoods State Park out to Gold Bluffs Beach, north of Orick.

With the sun setting, Zamboni jumps out of his truck, engages the 4-wheel drive and unlocks the contentious gate that allows a handful of commercial fishermen access to the beach’s plentiful smelt. Zamboni tells me that smelt caught commercially — which for the most part end up in Asian markets or as feed for aquariums — come from three places in the United States: the Great Lakes, the Columbia River and right here.

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Zamboni is dressed for work: a pair of dusty sweat pants, a fleece jacket and a baseball cap he wears high on his head so that his bangs poke out. As his truck skates back and forth across the soft sand, he explains over the roaring engine that he’s a little tired. The weather has been good recently, which means that over the past two days Zamboni has spent a total of 24 hours on his crab boat. He started crabbing at 5 o’clock this morning. Now it’s almost 8 p.m. and he’s on the beach looking for smelt. I glance over and catch Zamboni’s sharp profile silhouetted against the glow of the spotlight he’s shining out into the surf, searching for smelt. The fish run best when the tide is outgoing. If they’re there, we’ll see a thousand points of silver light shine back at us. “When they’re actually running, there’ll be 10,000 running on the beach there,” he shouts. On a good night, fishermen can dip their nets into the water and snag a hundred pounds of smelt in one fell swoop.

The 40-year-old Zamboni, who has a wildlife and fisheries science degree from Humboldt State University, is an unlikely champion of local fishermen. When he was in college, he wanted to work for the Department of Fish and Game; now he and his fellow fishermen are at loggerheads with that agency, and state and national parks as well.

If Redwood National and State Parks had their way, they’d phase out beach fishing all together, but a 2006 wilderness bill sponsored by Congressmen Mike Thompson ensures that there will be a handful of beach fishing permits in perpetuity. It’s been left up to the parks to regulate those permits, which has created a certain level of unconstructive tension between the guys who make their livelihood out on these rough shores and the agency with a mandate to protect the natural resource here.

“I wish there were a better working relationship between the industry and [Fish and Game and the parks],” Zamboni says.

Jeff Bomke, Acting Superintendent for the Redwood Coast Sector of the North Coast Redwoods District, admits that the park would rather close access to Gold Bluffs beach altogether, but because federal legislation protects beach fishermen, that’s no longer an option. Still, Bomke says he wouldn’t describe the relationship between his agency and the fishermen as tense. “We are in the business of protecting resources,” he explained last week from his office. “From our perspective it’s not tense, it’s our job.”

Zamboni remembers how different things were back in the ‘90s when there were fewer regulations and the fish were particularly plentiful. “You could just fill your truck pretty much seven days a week,” he recalls. “Every night you’d leave and there would still be fish running. There were 70 trucks on the beach here fishing and you’d line up bumper to bumper and everybody’d fill up a truck.” Now Zamboni describes beach fishermen — and North Coast fishermen in general — as having been “regulated into recession.”

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