I vividly remember a day, back when I was just a kid of about 8 years old, when my family was visiting close friends along the coast of southern Los Angeles. Jerry, the father of that family, a skipper who ran a fishing boat, was running a little late getting home and we were all holding dinner preparations to wait for him.
Well, dinner plans changed dramatically after he got home. He backed his big pickup truck into his driveway and hollered for us all to come out.
I got out the door first and stopped in my tracks with my jaw hanging open in awe. There were gasps behind me as everyone else filed through the doorway.
Jerry climbed out of his truck grinning ear-to-ear. We were all looking at a giant tail draped over his tailgate. I jumped up on the tire and looked into the bed of the truck, which was filled with a giant black seabass.
Jerry said, “It’s about 650 pounds and dinner’s gonna be late because we’ve got work to do.”
It was well into the evening before we had finished cutting and packaging that monster seabass. Jerry wasn’t much help because he was off on a high-priority shopping trip for a new freezer to put it in, but his wife knew how to cut a big fish and she gave good instructions.
By age 8, I had filleted plenty of fish, but this one wouldn’t exactly fit on the kitchen bread board.
That fresh black seabass still ranks as one of the tastiest meals I’ve ever had the pleasure to eat with gusto.
We could keep them back then and we didn’t yet know that they were being overfished. We had much to learn and when we did, a whole generation of anglers (my generation) gave up keeping them so they could rebuild and be managed carefully for future generations to enjoy.
Those memories played through my mind this week as I watched 12-year-old Victor Guadarrama of Goleta catch and release a 60-pound black seabass at Goleta Pier, right near my pier location of Hook, Line & Sinker fishing center.
That memory that will stay with young Victor who I’m sure will tell the tale of the big tail over many a campfire in his time.
There have been a number of catches of black seabass in Goleta Bay thanks to great habitat and a growing population of the big seabass. The one Victor released is old enough to be reproducing and the local population is growing.
The local habitat is ideal, between the pilings of the pier and the nearby artificial reef, a rock covered pipeline with kelp stands growing up from it. We’re doing good fisheries management work and Goleta Bay is becoming one of the epicenters of the resurgence of giant black seabass.
— Capt. David Bacon operates WaveWalker Charters and is president of SOFTIN Inc., a nonprofit organization providing seafaring opportunities for those in need. Visit softininc.blogspot.com to learn more about the organization and how you can help. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
