Gone Fishing

Alex Coolman

The wheels of Tom Pearson’s skateboard are clicking along the wooden

planks of the dock in the quiet of the early morning. He has got two

cardboard boxes of frozen mackerel stacked on the board, and he’s skating

them down to the water’s edge, where his boat Harvest is moored. Pearson

gives a few pushes for speed and hops on top of the frozen fish, coasting

along like a kid.

The light from the sun is only beginning to break through the haze as he

dumps the mackerel bricks in his hold, kicks Harvest’s engine into life

and cruises past the black rock jetties of the Dana Point Harbor. He

clicks on the weather radio, lights a cigarette and slips into a battered

pair of green rubber overalls.

Time to go to work.

Pearson, 38, is a lobster fisherman. He has been pulling traps out of

Southern California waters for more than two decades, following in the

footsteps of his father, Roy, who passed away in December 1998.

The Huntington Beach resident sells his catch, along with fish that he

and his wife, Terese, buy from other fishermen, at Pearson’s Port, a

small floating market anchored in the channel to Newport’s Back Bay. It’s

a market that was started by Roy and his wife, Vi, and it continues to be

the center of the family’s life, though Roy is no longer around.The

market is low-key and inconspicuous, a weathered wooden shack festooned

with shells and nets. It’s easy to drive right over it in the traffic

that races along East Coast Highway without even realizing it’s there.

But for what will be 28 years next month, Pearson’s Port has been quietly

doing business, family style.

Out in the water off San Clemente, Pearson motors up to a cluster of

black buoys and begins to pull up traps. He hooks one of the floats with

a gaff and threads the yellow buoy rope onto a motorized winch, drawing

the cage up from the sandy bottom.

When the cage finally surfaces, its gnarled wire form covered in maroon

weeds, a handful of lobsters are thrashing around in a corner.

It looks like a good catch, but only to an unpracticed eye.

A lobster has to be 3 1/4 inches from its eyes to the edge of its

carapace to be legal. Pearson can tell just from looking at these

undersized creatures that they don’t make the cut. He flips them

indifferently back in the ocean with a toss of his wrist.

A few others look more promising, and these he measures with a brass

lobster gauge. Only one, out of the entire lot, is worth keeping.

“It’s kind of a late year, all in all,” Pearson said, evaluating the

catch. “The lobsters are still spawning, and there are a lot of traps.”

But Pearson, cutting the head off a mackerel and throwing the fish into

the bait compartment of the cage, waxes philosophical.

“Some years are good, some are bad,” he said.

Taking the bounty -- and, sometimes, accepting the scarcity -- of the

ocean harvest is something Pearson has spent his life doing. When he

isn’t pulling traps, he can often be found surfing breaks like Lower

Trestles, cruising to outer islands for adventure or doing a little

diving. It’s a lifestyle that has Pearson always attuned to the fickle

behavior of the surf, even when he’s standing on dry land.

Sundays are “designated daddy” days for Pearson, when he spends time with

his daughters -- Haley, 5, and Carley, 3. More often than not, the

threesome heads down to the beach to check out the waves and play in the

sand.

Terese, no less than her husband, lives a life wedded to the sea. The

market’s supply of fresh fish -- from buttermouthperch to sheepshead to

shark -- are replenished through her frequent trips up and down the coast

to buy from fishermen.

“This business is one of those where you just have to work hard to make

it go, so that’s what we do all the time, work hard from the moment we

wake up,” she said.

There have been lean years -- like in 1983, when El Nino surf destroyed

almost all of the family’s traps at the beginning of the season.

And it can also be difficult to cope with the sheer stress of doing so

much work, much of which can be fairly repetitive and -- needless to say

-- fishy.

“I always think I’ll never get rid of the smell,” Terese Pearson joked.

“I think I’m going to go to a wedding and people will say ‘Oh my god,

does she ever wash?’ ”

Catch Pearson at the end of a morning hauling traps out of the water, and

he’ll make his own form of confession: “After 20 years of doing this

stuff, of course it’s a grind.”

But it’s hard to miss the flicker of glee that animates Pearson’s

normally reserved expression when he launches into a particularly juicy

surf story, or when he tells a tale about catching a spotted bass. In

such moments, the kid in Pearson ignites the man who has to handle all

the hard work.

“God, you know what? It’s so fun,” he said. “You catch a million of them,

and you still love it.”