Wildlife Wars: The Life and Times of a Fish and Game Warden

by Terry Grosz

  Later examination revealed that the pipe from the toilet to the outside environment had broken just above the exit hole. Instead of pumping the effluent overboard, we had been pumping it into the bilge! Damn, what an awful smell. In addition, a small fire on the starboard engine bulkhead caused by an overheated engine (in typical state fashion, our engines were designed for brackish water, not sea water) was sending smoke from burned paint, plastic, insulation, and oils into the air. If I hadn’t been seasick before, I certainly was now, and instantly. Vomiting as I walked through the warm bilge-water covered with a scum of human effluent toward the fire, carrying the fire extinguisher, I must have been a real sight. Some able-bodied seaman I made! Quickly putting out the small fire, I sloshed, walked, and vomited my way back to the hatch opening through the smoke and the heavy methane smell.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the methane generated from our waste, mixed in the warm bilge water, produced enough gas to cause an explosion. How do you write that one up or explain it to the U.S. Coast Guard? Ken continued to steer our vessel away from the rocks and out to sea. As the Rainbow turned seaward and sideways, the radarman on the target vessel got a clear look at us, and the men on the drag boat began to pull their net for an unencumbered escape run into the fog to the north.

  Devine, still watching from the cliffs, said, “What are you guys doing? He’s getting away! What the hell are you doing; why are you guys leaving?”

  Ken explained that we had lost an engine and were heading out to deeper water and the safety it offered. Joe acknowledged the response and said he would move north with the suspect boat and try to get a solid identification for courtroom use. In the meantime, Ken told Joe, if we got the engine fixed we would attempt to continue our pursuit of the offending ship just as long as Joe could keep it in view. With that, Devine moved north with the drag boat and we moved west, cleared the rocks, and set out an anchor. Examination of the offending engine revealed wiring burned beyond emergency repair; a trip home to the repair shops was in store. We called Joe and let him know. Joe told us he had lost the fisherman in the fog, and with that we called the detail off. We never did get enough firsthand information to prosecute that chap for fishing in the closed zone that day.

  For the next twelve hours the Rainbow limped south toward home, and I puked all the way. I got so sick that once I tried to go belowdecks and lie down in one of the bunks. I was so weak I couldn’t even crawl up the eighteen inches from the floor to the bunk. That was it, I told myself, no more of this activity for any reason. Once back at the docks in Eureka, we tied the vessel up to her moorings, and then Ken and I headed for the restaurant where we had eaten our deadly breakfast. Once there, it was all Ken could do to keep me from killing the cook, not to mention ripping off his lips and feeding them to the nearest magpie. Needless to say, the manager reimbursed us for the cost of our breakfasts, and the restaurant was closed down for a week by the health department shortly after it received Ken’s official report. A small reward for my puking throughout a sixteen-hour day.

  Several days later Ken and I made a report to Captain Gray, our supervisor. The captain listened intently and seemed more interested in my well-being than in the operation. Several days later I found out the true meaning of his so-called concern. He had assigned me to the N. B. Scofield, an old LST converted by the state of California into a research vessel, as part of my mandatory cross training. Captain Gray didn’t like game wardens with wildlife degrees, “goddamned biologists,” he called them. He thought he had finally figured out a way to get me to quit. Needless to say, the German rose up in me, and the captain and I had quite a discussion—one in which I apparently shared my feelings with everyone on that floor of the building. Suffice it to say that my sea duty ended that day, and I did not have to go on the N. B. Scofield for research training. It seemed that my master’s degree work would suffice.

  I have enjoyed every day of my career since then. I have been at sea very little since that day, and that is just fine with me. If I have to go back to sea to further the battle for this world of wildlife, I will. But you can bet your bottom dollar, it won’t be with a breakfast of chili under my belt. By the way, Hank never got that bottle of whiskey.

  Chapter Four

  The Big One That Didn’t Get Away

  Working as a trainee state Fish and Game warden in Humboldt County, California, I teamed up with several senior officers, including the Fortuna warden, Herb Christie, to patrol the many miles of rivers and streams holding the fall runs of silver and king salmon. Hundreds of fishermen, some good and many in the outlaw category, pursued their fishing avocation during that season along the numerous pools and riffles frequented by the salmon. Many fishermen believe it is hard to beat the fine eating a fresh-run salmon with sea lice will provide. In addition, sport-caught, smoked salmon brought many hundreds of dollars into the pockets of those inclined to break the conservation laws to steal and sell from nature’s pantry.

  In those days the limit for all salmon species sport-caught on the Pacific Ocean or in the interior waterways was three. For some reason, when the salmon arrived in the offshore waters or the interior river systems it seemed as if just about everyone involved in fishing for this species lost not only their common sense but their ability to count as well. Over-limits, double trips (catching a limit, taking the fish home, and coming back for more the same day), snagging, use of gill nets, use of explosives, fishing at night, spearing on the spawning riffles, and the like were all too commonplace. Most Fish and Game wardens just sucked it up and redoubled their efforts to hold the line on the waterways in order for the salmon to get a reasonable escapement for future runs. Since the migrating fish were confined to the river systems, that was the area where most officers concentrated their efforts. It was here that the fish were finally to mate, spawn, and die. The success of future fishing depended on the salmon being able to procreate in such numbers that another run would be forthcoming several years down the pike. Hence, the officers would flock to the historic spawning areas and through their enforcement efforts allow that miracle of nature to work its magic.

  Most people don’t realize that for every thousand eggs laid, only two fish will survive to spawn at a later date, two, three, or four years down the line. With those odds, the officers did not have much problem working long hours in dangerous areas, often alone, to give the salmon a hand. Since my warden position was to act as backup to three senior wardens on their days off, I found plenty to do. A sixteen-hour day, seven days a week trying to protect the salmon along the many hundreds of remote miles of river system in three large California counties was just about all I could handle. In fact, I ran myself ragged, along with a lot of knotheads breaking the laws, and loved it.

  During that particular period Herb Christie and I teamed up to try to catch the illegal salmon snaggers and night fishermen who plied their ugly trade along the Eel River in his district. During those days one could fish from one hour before sunrise until one hour after sunset. The rest of the night belonged to the fish so they could rest and continue their migration without disturbance. However, as I said, many fishermen lost their common sense when the salmon arrived and broke the conservation laws at will in order to catch the wily salmon. In the Fortuna area, Herb and I worked evening after evening to catch chaps using illegal snagging gear or fishing at night with their illegal Glo-Pups (a fishing lure that, when the light of a flashlight was directed at its surface, glowed in the dark waters for a few minutes after being cast out and was almost irresistible to salmon). Herb and I spent many evenings trying every trick of the trade we knew to hold the “thin green line” against outlaws of every kind. The bad guys, on the other hand, spent evening after evening trying to elude the local game wardens and, to be frank, were doing quite a good job. Keep in mind that those plying the illegal trade knew when and where they were going to violate the conservation laws. We knew only that the outlaws would be after the salmon somewhere along the many miles of river syste
m.

  Our goal was simple: to try to allow the salmon some rest as they proceeded upstream to take care of their ancestral duties. The snaggers too had a simple goal: to fill their freezers with the rich red meat a salmon took four years to put on its bones and could lose in a moment if snagged or illegally hooked after dark.

  One place in particular drew all three players—namely, illegal fishermen, game wardens, and salmon—and that was a spot called Singley Pool. Singley Pool was a three-hundred-yard-long pool of deep, slow-moving water on the Eel River that was bordered on each end by long, exhausting riffles. After running the lower riffles, the salmon would slide into Singley Pool with relief and rest until their strength returned. Sometimes the salmon remained in this pool for several days before obeying the genetic commands that drove them on to their foreordained deaths. Therein lay the problem. A known or historic concentration of salmon will draw in the human predators, and this area drew in the good, the bad, and the ugly in record numbers.

  Herb and I spent many an hour trying to work unobserved on the Singley Pool area in order to keep track of and maintain legal order among its many anglers. It was a tough proposition, no matter how we cut it. To get to the pool area proper, we had to cross a large, open dairy pasture in clear view of the outlaws for at least four hundred yards before we got to the fishing area. After many false charges we came to the conclusion that there was no easy way to make a successful approach and catch the lads in this fashion.

  Frustrating a game warden like that is dangerous. The warden comes to think he is really being challenged, and with that, out of the ashes will come an idea guaranteed to give the bad guys a gut ache—not to mention a thinner wallet after citation time.

  On one of Herb’s days off, as I was driving into Eureka after a morning checking ocean fishermen in the Trinidad area, an idea on how to work the Singley Pool hit me like a ton of bricks. Turning my patrol car around, I drove out to where an old college friend called High Tide, whose real name was John, lived. Knocking on the front door of his fishing shack, I heard a voice yell, “Out back.” I walked around the shack and came upon my friend dressing out four nice king salmon, about thirty pounds each. He was in the process of carefully removing the roe (egg sacks) from the females in order to make fish bait from them for use at a later date. When he looked up, High Tide’s eyes told me he had not been expecting his friend the game warden.

  “Morning, High Tide,” I said.

  He continued to look at me as if he were not happy to see me just at that moment. Turning his back to me in an attempt to shield what was lying on the cleaning table, he mumbled, “Morning.” At the same time he carefully tried to slide one of the fresh salmon under a piece of tarp on the cleaning table. How the hell one slides a thirty-plus-pound salmon out of sight right under a game warden’s nose I don’t know, but it was a nice try.

  “Where did all the fish come from?” I asked.

  Turning back toward me, High Tide looked me right in the eye and said, “I caught them this morning on the Mad River just above the freeway bridge.”

  “All of them?” I asked.

  “You know damn well I caught all of them,” he replied, somewhat exasperated.

  “All four, John?” I asked.

  “Would you and Donna like one?” he inquired, his voice pitched higher than usual.

  Laughing, I said, “John, I’m going to have to take all four of them since the limit is only three.”

  Turning back to the cleaning table, he turned off the hose that had been washing down the cleaning table and stuck his fillet knife in the dirt at his feet. “Can I at least have the roe?” he asked.

  “Sure, John,” I answered. “I don’t need the guts for evidence on a fish seizure.” He beamed, retrieved his fillet knife from the ground, and finished cleaning the fish. While he worked, I went back to the patrol car, retrieved my citation book, and walked back to High Tide and the objects of our attention. So as two friends visited, one cleaning fish and the other writing the one cleaning fish a citation for possessing an over-limit of salmon, the morning progressed. Once the salmon were cleaned, I placed evidence tags on them and High Tide and I sacked them up and placed them in the trunk of the patrol car. After we washed our hands, High Tide signed the citation and I gave him his copy. He folded the citation and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “Why are you here?” he asked. Good old John, he knew me well enough to know I was always working an angle.

  “John,” I said, “I need to borrow your wetsuit.”

  He was aware that I wasn’t a diver, or at least much of one, and asked, “What the hell are you up to now, Terry?”

  I told him, “Don’t ask, and I won’t have to lie to you.”

  He smiled, knowing damn well I was up to no good, went into the back room of his fishing shack, and fetched me his wetsuit. It would be a tad small, but High Tide was the biggest of my friends who owned a wetsuit, so it would have to do. His big, sheepish grin told me all was well on the over-limit issue. I had caught him fair and square after he had done a dumb thing, and he knew it. I’m sure he caught the awkward grin on my face as well, but when there’s only one game in town, everyone must play by the rules.

  After a few words on the use and care of the suit, I was out the door and heading south to the Eel River. Passing Humboldt Hill, where I lived, I stopped by my home, put the evidence salmon in the state evidence freezer, and then picked up a few more needed items, including an old welder’s glove my dog, Shadow, had dragged in from somewhere in our neighborhood. Then away I went.

  I parked my state patrol car a mile or so below Singley Pool in a thick grove of red alder away from prying eyes and taking my gear, including the wetsuit, slowly walked upstream, moving carefully around any fishermen I discovered along the way. My timing was perfect: I arrived at the long riffle below Singley Pool at dusk. I waited for the honest fishermen to leave, then changed into the wetsuit, hid my uniform and gun under the riverbank, and slid into the cool waters of the Eel River to test my latest idea. Walking, crawling, and swimming my way upstream through the rough edge of the riffle, I entered the lower end of Singley Pool at about nine p.m. I rested for a bit to get my bearings in the protective cloak of night and tried to see if anyone was fishing for salmon close by. Sure enough, above me and about one hundred yards away was a small bunch of men illegally fishing after hours. The glow of their cigarettes gave them away in the inky night. An old saying of Warden Joe Devine’s went through my mind. When the two of us had worked together at night and discovered outlaws by the glow of their cigarettes, Devine always used to say, “If you were in New Guinea, you would be dead now.” He had been a soldier in the South Pacific during World War II, and I guess he was referring to the Japanese snipers. Boy, old Joe sure was right. Every time someone lit up or pulled on a cigarette, I could see it very clearly. Quietly moving upstream, I stopped just opposite the four lads fishing for salmon in violation of the laws of the state. At that point I was no more than thirty-five yards across the river from them and looking my prey right in the eye.

  They were having a grand old time, knowing the game warden, dumb enough to drive across the extensive pastures adjacent to the fishing area at night, would give his position away with his headlights or the sound of his car and provide plenty of warning. So they weren’t a bit worried, and their fun continued as different members of the party occasionally looked over the riverbank to see if anyone was driving across the pasture in question.

  I stayed in the water about thirty to forty minutes watching these lads fish, gathering the information needed to prosecute each of them for fishing after hours. They were using the Glo-Pup lures, holding the flashlight to them in the palms of their hands to hide the light, then casting them out into the water for the unsuspecting salmon. The Glo-Pups were sailing by my head and landing right and left of my new position up to my neck in the river. When one landed not more than two feet away from my crocodile position, I quickly reached out with my gloved h
and and grabbed it. I felt a hard jerk from the lit cigarette attached to the fishing rod. Zzzzzzzzz went his reel as he jerked harder to really set the hook in his “salmon.”

  “Goddamn,” hissed a voice, “I got a big one, a really big one.”

  Chuckling, I thrashed around in the water, all the time pulling and jerking on the lure. Soon I heard one of the others saying, “Get the net, get the net.” Almost breaking out in a roar of laughter at this point, I kept my cool and kept pulling hard on the lure, splashing occasionally as a foul-hooked fish (one snagged somewhere other than its mouth) will do. It was too dark for the poor chaps to see me, and for all they knew they had a monster king salmon on the line—well, a monster at least.

  Zzzzzzzzz went the reel again, and I heard a voice say, “Get a net, hell, get a gun. This son of a bitch is the king of all the king salmon. I bet he will go one hundred pounds.” Three hundred twenty, I thought, grinning as I let myself be dragged toward their shore.

  Imagine the fun I was having. God, it was great. For once the game warden had the upper hand, uh, glove, that is. Is this chap going to get a surprise! I chuckled to myself. I really had to work hard at not laughing aloud as my feet finally touched the river bottom next to the eagerly waiting fishermen. Still working toward my “fishing buddies,” I kept up my thrashing and hell-raising in the water, hoping all the members of the fishing group would get close together to help the lad on the other end of the pole. If they did, it would make it easier to capture all of them in one fell swoop if I had to get physical.