COLUMN ONE : Defiantly, They Still Fish the Sea : Tough old-timers in weathered boats are the last of San Pedro’s once-great fleet. Hardship and desperation forge friendships, bitter rivalries among men who can’t stop chasing the big catch.

What’s left of the San Pedro commercial fishing fleet is a pack of leather-faced men with the look of shipwreck survivors.

Their world is rough--and getting rougher. For one thing, a lot of the fish are gone. Some nights the boats scour the black ocean into the wee hours, only to come back with too little to pay for the diesel fuel. Sometimes when bills are due, when crewmen are burning garlic and bay leaves or whispering prayers in hopes of landing a good 50-ton load of mackerel or squid, offshore winds kick up, or there are storms, and the boats can’t go out at all.

Darwinian forces as fierce as in any jungle have decimated the fishermen’s ranks, sparing only the most hardy and cunning, a fact that has engendered in them a certain maverick pride. It is evident in the way they talk, raw and plain; in boats that fly the skull and crossbones; in the tendency of the old-timers to hang on into their 60s and even 70s, clinging like barnacles to a trade passed down to them through generations.

“We’re part of history, fading away,” said Tony Mattera, 64, a bantam man with sandpaper jaws who joined the fleet after moving west from Brooklyn at 17. “I love fishing with all my heart. But I’m very sad. . . . Everything is dying out. Being a good American, doing my job, being a good fisherman--it’s just for naught.”

There was a time, half a century ago, when the San Pedro commercial fleet was one of the largest on earth: 300 or 400 boats, so many they nearly clogged the channel at Los Angeles Harbor. An entire village of Japanese American fishermen maintained boats on Terminal Island until World War II, when federal authorities demolished their homes and sent the men and their families to internment camps.

Even after that, the fleet prospered, drawing fishermen from far and wide during California’s post-war boom years. Its annual harvest in the late ‘40s amounted to hundreds of thousands of tons of sardines, tuna and other fish that were sold at teeming wholesale markets or processed at two dozen roaring, foul-smelling canneries.

Only a skeleton of that industry remains, the rest of it stripped away by decades of ravaging problems: declining fish populations and restrictive catch laws, the rise of cheaper-working foreign fleets, boat sinkings, infighting and cannery closures one after another after another.

The downward spiral--typical of the woes afflicting fleets in Monterey, San Diego and other domestic ports--has reached a frightening nadir. Today, just two canneries operate in San Pedro: Pan Pacific, which processes tuna and other seafood, and a Heinz pet food plant. Pan Pacific filed for bankruptcy protection in September; whether it will continue to run is the fleet’s latest big worry.

The economic onslaught has hammered some fishermen into retirement, driven others to Mexico or elsewhere. Left now are mainly nail-tough die-hards, a few hundred men and their crews who fish because, more often than not, it is all they know how to do.

Many are immigrants or the sons of immigrants: Italians and Yugoslavs with heavy accents and crucifixes hanging in the cabin; Vietnamese who fled their homeland because of the war, now keeping to themselves, fearful of outsiders, selling live halibut and sea bass to couriers who truck the fish by van to restaurants in Chinatown; and Spanish-speaking deckhands from Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, who wade into the cold seawater down in the hold to unload the catch, and who stand on the wharves in the slanting afternoon sunlight, mending great black mounds of nets.

Hard labor works a brutal friction on them all. More than a few longtime fishermen have lost fingers to knives and power winches; others limp around favoring bad knees or a leg shattered in some long-ago mishap.

Gray-haired and stolid, they form an odd, surprisingly complex sphere: a cliquish world where hardship and desperation throw men together in tight alliances and pull them apart in bitter rivalries. Bands of fishermen known as “code groups” chip in for the common good of a few, hiring scout planes that skim the ocean at night on a search for mackerel, sardines or other catch visible as faint luminescent patches on the water. The precious information is shared only within the code group: In some cases, it is relayed from plane to vessel by means of unlicensed radio frequencies.

“We all have dirty radios,” said Larry Felando, 64, a burly, outspoken man whose grandfather settled in San Pedro 101 years ago.

Illegal frequencies are deliberately wired into the radios, changing the normal transmission band, Felando said. There are perhaps half a dozen light planes that work for the fleet, each transmitting to groups of at least four or five boats. Sometimes the code groups change; allegiances dissolve, new partnerships form. Counterespionage takes place--boats and planes watching the movements of other boats, passing the word along.

Clandestine gifts--lobsters, cases of whiskey--change hands as fishermen try to curry favor from pilots even within their own code groups, said retired fisherman Frank Iacono, 74, whose son was a scout pilot until 12 years ago, when he narrowly escaped death after his Cessna crashed.

Emotions often run high in a trade where every outing is a high-stakes roll of the dice. Looking to gain an edge, fishermen rely on scout planes, sonar and even satellite reports on the fluctuations in water temperature; and still there are winners and losers. One man goes out all night and can’t even find enough fish to cast the net for. Another redeems a $4,000 load of rock cod, hauled in from some bank or ridge that becomes his own private gold mine.

“You don’t know if the guy went off Santa Barbara Island, San Nicolas Island, San Clemente [Island] or outside San Diego,” said Carlton Fromhold, 34, Felando’s partner and one of the few men in the fleet younger than 40. “Nobody says much. If he says he was out at San Nicolas, you can damn near bet he was 20 or 30 miles from there.”

‘That’s the Law of the Sea’

There are known spots to look for certain fish, but the sea is a moving three-dimensional puzzle, infinitely complicated. From the silvery six-inch sardines that swim in 50-ton schools near shore to 200-pound bluefin tuna that race across the high seas like torpedoes, commercial fish come in abundant variety, all with their own favorite habitats, temperature zones and migratory cycles.

Timely information is the lifeblood of the fleet. The news about what is being found where circulates over radios, over cellular phones, over the bows of boats and over cups of coffee. Two main organs serve as gossip clearinghouses: the fish markets--a row of dank, concrete wholesale outlets strung along the wharf--and Canetti’s, a period diner where fishermen slug down caffeine at dawn after the nightly haul is brought in.

Canetti’s was founded in 1949, and looks it. The walls are cluttered with old fishing pictures (“A five-ton catch of albacore with rod & reel . . . at Catalina Island, 1902”), and there are no menus, only blackboards where the seafood fare is scrawled in chalk. It is a place to hear about matters as far-ranging as the current offering price for squid (about $300 a ton), whose boat just blew an engine, who came down with cancer after 40 years of chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes, who is mad at whom over what, and who got busted for trapping undersized lobster.

By 11 each morning, the red-checked tables empty out. “All the talk’s been talked,” Fromhold said. “All the people know what happened the night before . . . who unloaded what, for what price.”

Bad times and hard-luck stories flow through the conversations the way the tides surge through the rocks of the harbor. The sea is fickle. The sea gives, but the sea also takes away. There are wondrous mild nights when the black sky is scattered with stars, the skiff sets the waves flashing with phytoplankton’s blue fluorescence, and the mackerel come pouring out of the brail nets like silver dollars gleaming in the arc lights. And there are also times when the weather turns sour, when the waves and the winds and the fates all seem to gang up on the fishermen with vengeful malice.

Tootie Russo knows very well the almost mystical vicissitudes of the deep. At 67, he is the eldest of no fewer than three Sal Russos who can be found down on the wharves, and so everyone calls him by his nickname, an Italian abridgment of Salvatore--Tootie. He is a large, blunt-spoken man who can barely read or write.

Go back seven years and Russo was awash in fabulous fortune. That was when the giant tuna were running--fish that seemed to come out of nowhere, absolute behemoths weighing upward of 800, 900, even 1,000 pounds. They were of a size never before landed on the California coast, and their appearance touched off a frenzy. Fishermen who had struggled for years were suddenly making the money to pay off debts, buy new cars, take vacations abroad.

There were stories about Japanese buyers showing up on the docks with satchels of cash, eager to satisfy the demand on the world sushi market. Single fish sold for $20,000: A big 1,000-pounder would be packed up for shipment in a box the size of a coffin.

“They were something that God gives you once in a lifetime,” said Russo, who figures he caught 700 of the giant fish while the run lasted. He reaped a windfall of close to $200,000, and poured virtually all of it back into his 72-foot tuna boat, the Tootur, replacing tattered nets, remodeling, installing new electronic gear.

Then suddenly the giant tuna disappeared, as mysteriously as they came. Three years later, Russo’s luck hit rock bottom. The Tootur became caught in the 130-m.p.h. winds and 60-foot swells of Hurricane Darby off the coast of Mexico in 1992. The storm broke the rudder, smashed out all the windows and tore up both of Russo’s knees. With him and his boat crippled, Russo and crew were forced to abandon ship. They were rescued from life rafts many hours later, and the Tootur was eventually hauled to port as scrap by Mexican salvagers--who still have it.

Now stripped, the vessel is the target of a years-long and so far futile legal battle by Russo to get it back. All he’s got for his trouble are knees so bad he needs painkillers every day just to get around.

“I lost everything,” he said. “They stole my boat in Mexico, and they took everything.”

Some fishermen feel for Russo, but only some. Sympathy is hard-won in the fleet. Men who have had run-ins with Russo say he can be difficult, obnoxious. At least a few figure he got what was coming.

“God was just taking care of [him],” Felando said.

Most fishermen doubt that Russo will ever recover the boat, worth $500,000 before the storm.

“It belongs to those who found it,” said one man, who asked not to be named. “That’s the law of the sea.”

Most Canneries Died Out Long Ago

Harsh attitudes have fermented like port wine through years of financial strife. Back when all the canneries were running, the demand for fish was high, and competition between the canneries and the fish markets kept the fishermen earning a relatively good income. The men took orders for fish and went out to sea to fill them. They brought in sardines, anchovies, tuna and mackerel for canning; barracuda, bonito and such for frozen export, and crab, halibut, swordfish and other varieties for sale at supermarkets and restaurants.

Market and restaurant sales still account for substantial trade, but most of the canneries died out long ago when the sardines and mackerel went into decline. Sardines started to disappear first, in the early ‘50s, and mackerel soon after that. The fishermen got squeezed: Even as canneries were failing, government stepped in to try to save the vanishing fish. Along came catch quotas and off-seasons and no-fishing zones and laws about nets and traps and licenses.

The proliferating rules brought an end to the fishing free-for-all, and still some fish populations never fully recovered.

One of the last large-scale canneries on Terminal Island was sold in the 1980s to an organization of fishermen, a move designed to relieve Star-Kist without further hurting the fleet. But the fishermen-run cannery was plagued by management disputes--where to export, what to charge, how to invest in new equipment. The arrival of the giant tuna only made matters worse, said Iacono, who ran the factory for a time.

Fishermen undercut their own cannery by selling the tuna to higher-paying fish markets and Japanese buyers, Iacono said. Before long the cannery went under and the Fishermen’s Cooperative Assn.--the “ un cooperative association,” some called it--went bankrupt.

The leverage in setting fish prices has since swung to the fish markets. There are about a dozen, side by side in the same ancient monolith of a building near the mouth of the harbor channel. At one end the fish are unloaded from the boats with winches and giant vacuums, and at the other they are rolled across the loading docks onto trucks. Fishermen rely on the markets, work intimately with them, and trust them with all the faith afforded by men who fight off extinction at every turn.

The fishermen fought, in fact, to get inspectors put on the wharf, just to be sure that fish were not being unloaded into the markets without being weighed and paid for; one California Department of Fish and Game official remembered unfounded suspicions about secret trap doors and hidden conveyor belts.

No such devices were ever found, but pricing disagreements alone are enough to foster resentment.

In the vernacular of the fleet, the markets are almost always called “the 40 Thieves,” as in Felando saying, “Where can we sell our fish? You’ve got the ’40 Thieves’ buying, but they pay rock-bottom prices. You’re at their mercy. . . . Guys are fishing for sardines today at $60 [a ton], right? In 1951, we were getting $63.50.”

There are more boats than the markets can accommodate, and there has been a very painful attrition. Mattera, the Brooklyn transplant, said that during a good year, long ago, he used to make $35,000 or $40,000 running his 58-foot purse seiner, the Mary Louise. Last year, his take was $18,000.

Overhead is high. A 50-ton load of sardines might be worth $3,700, but a large seiner guzzles 18 or 20 gallons of diesel fuel an hour--say, $300 on a busy night. There are maintenance costs: Dry-docking every year to patch dings or get worms out of the hull can cost $20,000 or more. A purse-seine net, which surrounds and draws up fish the way a change purse pulls closed with a draw string, can run a quarter-mile to more than a mile in length and cost $40,000 to $100,000 to replace, should it become shredded in the rocks.

A fisherman who owns his boat typically keeps 40% of the take after expenses, and the rest is divided up among perhaps half a dozen deckhands. Each hand might get $150 on a good night, or flat nothing when the boat comes back empty. There are usually bunks aboard, and some men sleep until the fish are found, saving energy to supplement their incomes with daytime labor ashore.

Mattera figures he survives only because his boat and his home are paid for. However, the Mary Louise, like most boats in the fleet, is getting old: It was built during Hitler’s time.

One of the fleet’s biggest problems is that no one can afford to replace vessels as rusted and dinged up as clunker cars. A great majority of the larger boats date to the ‘40s and ‘50s. They ply the surging currents from Mexico to Santa Barbara and beyond, tempting fate with leaky wood planks, guttural diesel engines that tend to seize up or blow gaskets, and not so much as a dime of insurance, because nobody today wants to touch them.

Many sport crudely painted names and jury-rigged machinery: One boat, gone now, was remembered for a cascading system of barrels and siphons to channel fuel down to the engine room. Its owner eventually got another boat, fished until he scraped together the money to bring his family over from Vietnam, then capsized in a ramshackle, top-heavy trawler and drowned off Huntington Beach.

Sinkings are an all-too-frequent occupational hazard. California led the nation last year: 21 commercial vessels went down. Thirteen fishermen lost their lives. At one time or another, just about every veteran of the fleet has found himself clutching lines or belting down shots of whiskey below deck because of sudden storms, breakdowns or flooding.

“It’s a risk just being out there with these boats,” said Benny Mattera (no relation to Tony), whose 92-foot purse seiner was built in 1944. “We had one guy here . . . had a little bad weather and the planks just opened up. The boat went down in one minute.”

That incident, earlier this year, ended in a successful rescue, Mattera said, but financial conditions being what they are, a boat going down generally means early retirement. That risk has been heightened, oddly enough, by the expanding market importance of squid, a cargo whose bizarre properties make it especially hard on the boats.

Squid fill the nets and flatten out like a latex lining, bringing up lots of water. The weight makes them difficult to get aboard, and once they are dumped into the hold they slosh around like so much wet cement. A haul too large, or seas too rough, can trigger disaster in the blink of an eye.

“First the binboards . . . the partitions in the hatch . . . break and then you’ve got the full force of 15 or 20 tons of squid going from one side of the boat to the other,” Fromhold said. “They’ll just roll the boat. . . . Or sometimes the bulkheads to the engine room will break away and flood the whole engine with squid. Then you’ll just drift out there and have to have someone tow you in, and it’s a mess getting everything out of the engine--all that squid and squid ink.”

The ever-present risk of trouble has given rise to all manner of superstitions designed to ward it off. Among them are: Don’t whistle, or the wind will come up. Banish evil spirits by burning bay leaves and garlic. Lift the hatch, but don’t turn it over--the luck will spill out. And never set sail on a Friday.

“I made a trip on a Friday,” remembered Joseph (Josey) Silva, a 71-year-old tuna boat captain, whose rueful smile flickered under a white mustache. “They never brought the boat back.”

Silva ended up in the fog near Point Reyes, north of San Francisco. It was 1961. He was radioed a bad navigational fix, he said, and promptly piled up on the rocks, not only destroying the boat but spilling out 160 tons of albacore in the process. The accident ruined him, he said, for about 10 years.

Fishing is big-time Vegas gambling, said Silva, who like most high-rollers has won some and perhaps lost a few more. He had another boat, a big 120-footer, go down right in Los Angeles Harbor in 1985, a mishap related perhaps less to a shortage of garlic and bay leaves than to engine trouble and leaks. The Jo Ann was awaiting $40,000 in repairs, but Silva was short, having already borrowed on his home, when the thing finally took too much water. He said it sank with just enough poking up to require a hazard buoy, which he was asked to pay for.

“They’re still billing me,” Silva said of harbor officials. “It was $3,000 . . . originally. It’s up to about $10,000 now.”

He cracked a grin, letting it be known that he isn’t about to pay it. “Let ‘em take the boat,” he said, throwing a nod toward the channel. “There’s the boat.”

There’s a good argument that only cynics, curmudgeons and scofflaws are tough enough to make a go of it fishing in a climate about as inhospitable as a war zone. Fish and Game laws set up a minefield of potential trouble, regulating everything from the size of the mesh in the gill nets to where boats can and cannot lower traps.

Then to enforce it the state brought in a game warden of unparalleled zeal--a former U.S. Army paratrooper who had a third of his left calf blown off in Vietnam, but who retained the go-get-’em mentality to hide for days in the scrub on offshore islands, keeping company only with his camping gear, binoculars and night-vision scope, in pursuit of catch violators.

“I am a hunter--I have a hunting personality,” said Lt. Mark Caywood, now 49, who policed the fishing fleet from 1982 to 1993, mainly from a 40-foot patrol boat. If a fisherman saw him coming and threw his illegal abalone or lobsters overboard, Caywood grabbed a snorkel and dove right after it.

Now that he is gone, reassigned because of budget cuts, Fish and Game is trying out a new approach, training sportfishermen to use video cameras to nab commercial violators. The tack takes advantage of the natural rivalry between the sport boats, which profit from recreational fishing, and the commercial fleet, which competes for and sells some of the same catch.

Many in the fleet are bitter about all the laws and scrutiny. Sewage pipes and industrial runoff pollute Santa Monica Bay, and the fleet loses a good chunk of its fishing grounds. John (Turk) Emirzian, a former circus fire-eater, rails against the near-shore ban on gill nets, what he calls the “Bambi” sentimentality of environmentalists, and the fact that non-fishermen are drafting today’s regulations.

“You wonder why people go into the post office and shoot their fellow workers, or get in a tank?” he said. “They’re under that . . . tremendous stress . . . to see your money going away, and you’ve worked so hard.”

Rarely these days is commercial fishing passed down, as it used to be, from father to son. Benny Mattera, who is 62 now, and his son John, 36, are among the few exceptions. But John’s back is bad, and Benny is tired, not well. Their boat needs a lot of work--the tanks are rusted, the boom and mast are deteriorated.

Benny sat on the deck on a late afternoon and tried to look to the future.

“I don’t see any future,” he said, looking out across the channel. “I figure at my age, and the way the fishing is, I’m just marking time until they dig the hole and stick me in.”