Fisherman Is Last of the Line--and Still in Search of the Next Big Catch : Lifestyles: Frank Quan is the only shrimper remaining on San Pablo Bay. A century ago, thousands of Chinese-Americans made their living off the waters.

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. —  Most mornings, long before the sun has stretched its first shimmering finger over the chilly waters of San Pablo Bay, Frank Quan pushes off from the weathered wooden pier of China Camp, looking for the day’s shrimp catch.

Sometimes he returns, his nets bulging with the slippery gray reatures. Other times, he’s pelted by rain and wind and comes home with just a handful of shrimp.

It’s a typical fisherman’s life. A century ago, it was shared by several thousand Chinese-Americans living in fishing shanties strung along the shores of the San Francisco Bay. But 67-year-old Quan is the last man left, a solitary outpost of history still governed by the tides that ruled his father and his father’s father.

“He’s the very last of what really was a large enterprise that the vast majority of Californians have no idea about,” said Larry Perkins, a ranger and unofficial historian of what is now China Camp State Park.

In the 1890s, immigrant merchant Quan Ho Quack set up a general store in China Camp. Back then, the village, which at its peak numbered about 500, was one of about 30 communities in the area started by Chinese immigrants, many lured by the California gold rush.

Armed with efficient bag nets, the fishermen soon found there was gold to be mined from the bay. They hauled in thousands of pounds of grass shrimp, which they dried--a pungent Asian delicacy--and shipped back home at a tidy profit.

But the newcomers’ success raised hackles in the fishing industry, and soon laws were passed, one of which banned exporting dried shrimp, Perkins said. In 1911, the bag net was outlawed, putting virtually all the Chinese fishermen out of work.

“The shrimp towns became ghost towns overnight,” he said.

At China Camp, glimpses of the past smile from an album of photographs tinted sepia with age: family groups in their Sunday best; piles of shellfish in sunlight-dappled sheds.

The mountains of sun-dried shrimp, the chatter of shelling machines--all that’s gone now, represented in a museum exhibit housed in one of the restored shacks.

But Quan remains, tied to the gentle rhythms of a decades-old lifestyle, snug in a renovated wooden house.

“I enjoy the work,” said Quan, whose weather-roughened hands and wind-burned cheeks are testament to hours spent in the salty sting of the sea.

His home, set on the muddy fringes of San Pablo Bay, with only the ripple of the incoming tide and the cry of a sea gull to break the silence of a sunny afternoon, seems tranquil and remote on a weekday.

But weekends bring crowds of hikers and picnickers, and Quan points out that San Francisco looms a mere 20 miles to the south.

“I’m not a hermit,” Quan said. “My car’s got about 130,000 miles on it.”

Quan is here because his grandfather hung on to the general store after the exodus of 1911, eking out a living.

Eventually, new fishing methods circumvented the restrictive laws. By the 1930s, Quan’s father and uncle were trawling for shrimp, the method Quan still uses.

Over the years, other members of the family moved away but Quan stayed, except for a stint in the South Pacific during World War II.

“The family needed help, so I was the one who stayed,” he said.

He learned to fish “when I was big enough to get on the boats,” and still thinks the early morning forage for shrimp is the best part of his day, even though changes in the bay have whittled the catch from hundreds of pounds to a dozen or so.

The worst part?

“Getting up at 3 a.m. and you know you’re not going to catch anything.”

These days, Quan makes more money selling shrimp as bait than as food, but he still occasionally fries up some of his catch to serve at the little cafe he runs on the waterfront with the help of cousins during the busy season.

The state charges Quan rent--”Hey, we’re a government bureaucracy,” Perkins said--but he is able to make a living between his catch and food sales.

Perkins calls Quan “living history. . . . I don’t know who’s going to replace him.”

But Quan shrugs when it comes to assessing his place in history.

“It’s like anything else,” he said. “You’re out there trying to scratch out a living.”