Fishing the Okie way

When I was growing up, there were four fishing fleets in Southern

California. Three were made up of distinct ethnic groups.

There was the Portuguese fishing fleet in San Diego. There was the

Yugoslav fishing fleet in San Pedro. There was the Japanese fishing

fleet in Fish Harbor on Terminal Island. And there was the Newport

Beach fishing fleet, a polyglot group without any distinctive ethnic

identity.

It’s a little hard to identify as an ethnic group fishermen with

names such as McMillen, Hales, Shafer, Mill, Dyson, Dixon, Johnson,

Sharps and Anich. Late in the game, a fifth was added, the Okie

Fishing Fleet.

Newport Beach had a fishing fleet from the very beginning, an

integral part of the local economy. As a Balboan, I was only vaguely

aware of it, and then only because in the early hours of the morning

we could hear the Newport fishermen going to work.

In those days, before the harbor was dredged, what is now Newport

Harbor was a maze of mud flats, sand bars, sand islands and swamp. A

narrow channel ran from the Rhine, where the fishing fleet made its

home, to the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, hugging the bay side of the

peninsula.

At the yacht club, it turned left around Bay Island, then went

between mud flats to a channel that Joe Beek had dredged through the

Bay Island mud flat so his ferry could cross. They then followed a

narrow channel next to the peninsula up to the Point, where the

always hazardous harbor mouth awaited. Beyond that was the ocean and

fish.

The exception to this was the dory fisherman, who rowed their

dories out through the surf and then several miles out into the ocean

to do their fishing. They rowed for the simple reason that mankind

had not as yet invented a retractable propeller for boats. If you

came into the beach with a propeller-driven craft, as soon as you hit

the sand, you lost your propeller.

An ingenious local dory fisherman named Shorty Guenther thought he

had the answer. Shorty equipped his boat with an airplane engine on a

stand, attached a propeller to it and, voila, he was off to the

fishing grounds without having to row a stroke. It was a grand idea.

Shorty started out just fine. The engine made a lot of noise, the

propeller whirled, and the boat entered the water.

When the first wave hit the boat, the boat stopped, but the

airplane engine, the propeller and Shorty didn’t. They just kept

going. After that, dory fishermen continued to row.

Then came the Great Depression, and the so-called Okies began to

escape the dust bowl by coming to California. Most of them went to

the Central Valley and were immortalized by John Steinbeck in the

“The Grapes of Wrath.” Some didn’t get as far as Fresno. Some only

got as far as Newport Beach.

There, dirt farmers though they were, they decided to become

fishermen. Of course, they didn’t know diddly about fishing.

For example, about this time, scoop fishing for mackerel became

popular. The traditional way for fishing for mackerel was with jigs.

However, someone discovered that by holding a light over the water at

night, the curious mackerel would come up to look at the light, and

you could simply scoop them aboard.

The Okies were thrilled at this way to catch fish, so thrilled

that a good many of them scooped so many mackerel aboard that they

swamped their boats. That’s when Marco Anich, son of pioneer

fisherman Pete Anich, christened them the Okie Fishing Fleet.

Unfortunately, all these fishermen, plus the live bait boats, plus

sport fishing from every yacht in the harbor, finally caught all the

fish in the Catalina channel. The canneries closed, and our fishing

fleet, as well as the Okie Fishing Fleet, disappeared.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge.

His column runs Tuesdays.