Operation Ab Intercept

The Fish & Game checkpoint at the Boonville Fairgrounds Sunday morning caused quite a flurry of desperate activity between Boonville and Philo, what with last minute ditchings of illegally taken abalone and vehicles copping sudden u-turns on Highway 128 to avoid the large presence of State Fish and Game wardens up ahead.

The checkpoint had only been in operation about an hour or so when local resident Steve Rhoades came by to tell the more than 20 armed wardens that someone had ditched four abs right by his house on Haehl Street in Boonville, then had fled back northwest toward the Mendocino Coast. It was clear to Rhoades that the poachers, who had been headed south, had belatedly spotted the checkpoint a few yards ahead, but had veered off onto Haehl almost at the checkpoint, hurriedly secreted their abs behind a bush, and sped off hoping to come back later to retrieve their ill-gotten mollusks.

Rhoades had watched the ab bandits dump their illicit cargo and had gotten the license number of the suspect vehicle, which was stopped near Caspar later in the day. Another vehicle had dumped off two float tubes in Boonville containing 15 untagged abalone, eight in one tube, seven in the other. A third vehicle boldly ran the roadblock but got away when the pursuing game warden chased the blockade buster up the Ukiah road as he floored it straight south for Cloverdale.

As the day progressed, Coast-based warden Don Powers, who was in charge of the intercept operation, stationed patrol vehicles back toward Philo to watch for people throwing abs out into the bushes and make hasty turn arounds as they got word of the checkpoint up ahead.

With 21 wardens working the interdiction, there were as many as a dozen vehicles being searched at any given time. The wardens positioned out on the highway would ask southbound drivers if they’d been abalone diving or fishing. If the answer was yes, they were directed into the parking lot and their catch counted and measured.

If they said no but possessed wet suits and dive gear they were waved on into the Fairgrounds parking lot anyway for a once-over.

Lots of people said yes, and you have to wonder at the pure numbers of people annually unleashed on a shellfish in a relatively small area. We seem to be talking endangered species when we talk abalone.

“Just pull in here and put your catch out in front of your gear on the ground. Where you folks from?”

“The Bay Area.”

“What part?”

“San Leandro.”

“Well, we must have had the whole town of San Leandro here today,” the warden pleasantly replies as he measures San Leandro's abs. “Sorry, but this one’s too small.”

Koryn Castro, 16, of Lake County was on a “ride along” with one of the wardens; she's decided she wants to join up as a career when she finishes school. The young woman was clearly enjoying her day at the barricades of game protection, and by the end of her shift she had a small collection of starfish she'd picked off the abalone and random sea wrack that came out of the many stopped and searched vehicles.

The Bay Area sons of the sea also had taken a lot of rockfish and mussels, the limit on rockfish being 10 as of May 1 with a 10 pound limit on the mussels.

“Next time I’m going to bring a scale,” one warden said to a mussel-laden traveler. “The limit is 10 pounds and you have three bags full. I’m just going to give you a warning today, but next time I’ll bring a scale and weigh your mussels.”

The next up was approached.

“Take your abalone out and place it in front of your gear. Those two are definitely legal. Nice! Oh, that’s a real nice one. When did you catch these?”

“Three yesterday and three today.”

“Good. That’s the right way. You get an award for doing it right.”

The rewards consisted of Junior Warden stickers, Stop Poaching bumperstickers, and little tape measures. The kids were delighted.

“Did you do any fishing?”

“No. There were too many people out there. You couldn’t throw your line out without catching somebody in the ear!”

I asked Warden Powers if the Abalone Watch volunteers — locals concerned at the environmental health of the besieged seaside — were helping to cut down on poaching.

“Yes,” he said. “But they want to be given the authority to search people. I can’t give them that. We can’t have ordinary citizens subjecting people to search and seizure. It’s against the Fourth Amendment.”

By 10am the southbound ab traffic had slowed. About 11, the campers started coming through. More abalone were seized. One vehicle took off with suspicious haste up Mountain View Road. A Highway Patrol Officer went after it, but that vehicle got away, too.

Warden Powers said the worst offender so far this year is See Ping Bob Ng of the Willits Buffet. The season had only been open for a month last year and already Mr. Ng had gathered 70 abalone. Powers got a search warrant and found 50 wet suits in Bob Ng’s possession.

Asian diners will pay a hundred bucks for a fresh abalone dinner.

“He’s a one-stop poaching shop,” Powers said of Ng. “And Deputy DA Tim Stoen is prosecuting him. He’s a real kingpin.”

The case against Ng was filed in December; the 70 abalone were taken at the end of last November. The Willits restaurateur was caught with duplicate abalone fishing cards and other incriminating, poaching-related items.

“The 70 we found is nothing compared to what he got away with,” Powers said.

At the end of Boonville Interdiction Day — the wardens had arrived shortly before dawn to set up and worked until shortly after 1pm — they had confiscated approximately 50 abalone and miscellaneous diving gear. Some of the poachers, those who had tried to flee, were taken into custody. The others were cited and released. The day’s work will result in some hefty fines, since most of the cases will add up to over $2,000 in fines not to mention the likely confiscation of their expensive diving gear.

Warden Powers said he would donate some of the day’s catch to the Anderson Valley Senior Center.

The following three statements represent two eyewitness accounts of what Interdiction Day looked like on the ocean end, and an opinion by Rod Jones of Mendocino Ab Watch:

Writing from Glass Beach, Fort Bragg, Sunday, David Gurney reports: “This morning's low tide of -1.6 ft at 6:30 a.m. was one of the lowest of the year. I was up early, and decided to take the dog on a run on at Glass Beach ‘Haul Road’ on the north end of town. When I got there, I was startled to see cars lined up-and-down both sides of Elm Street, all the way from Denny's to the park entrance. Both sides of the street were packed parked cars. Similarly, the entire parking lot, and the two-square block area of the Stewart Street was packed with cars, on both sides. A quick count gave an estimate of at least three hundred passenger cars and vans. Except for a few locals mixed in, the crowds were almost exclusively people talking excitedly in what appeared to be Chinese - not a word of English was heard. Some vehicles were loading up with what looked like two to six passengers a apiece, climbing in and out of their wetsuits on the street. Loose groups of people, four and five abreast, trudged up and down the beach trail in their wetsuits in lines, dive tubes on their backs. One man I spoke to said he'd gotten his limit, but said observed a group of fifty divers working together in one of the small coves. There was not a single Fish and Game warden, nor a single yellow-clad ‘Abalone Watch’ volunteer in sight. It might be safe to say that there're aren't too many legal-sized abalone left within easy reach at Glass Beach right now. With a limit of three abalone per person, and three to four people per car, you could estimate that sat least 2,700 to 3,600 abs were pried from their watery haunts at Glass Beach this morning, by the hungry hoards up from the Bay Area and Sacto. At least legally. It's a phenomenon unlike any I've seen in close to 40 years of living on the NorCoast.”

Robert Coppock writes: “Fish and Game and the Ab Watch people were there, but the whole Coast was super busy. I arrived at Van Damme at 6:45am and there were several inflatables each carrying five divers coming in with their limits. I checked and all were properly tagging and logging and had legal abs. There were more than 25 people driving away with limits by 7:30, but still there were plenty of people in the water, and more heading in. The locals seemed to be the last ones into the water. Some divers on the rocks south of the beach came in later with limits, along with a bunch of perch and a few urchins. By the way, most of these people seem to be Vietnamese, not Chinese. But they knew the rules. It's just that there were a lot of them. On Saturday, the Ab Watch people at Glass Beach found only a few who were in some sort of violation, including one undersize. The people who were at Glass Beach on Saturday were mostly at Jughandle on Sunday. But there were lots of other places. You can't be everywhere. On my way to Van Damme from Albion this morning, I saw ten cars parked along the road at Dark Gulch. Gordon Lane was also packed, I hear. F&G can't be everywhere, so they pick the spots where there most likely would be real poachers and where they can get good evidence of wrongdoing, such as scuba spotters and one diver collecting for others. In lots of cases, you can't tell if anything illegal is happening unless you are out there, if then. One reason we are getting more people here this year seems to be because the Fort Ross area is closed. The season has been shortened there.”

And Rod Jones of Mendocino Ab Watch comments: “You know one of my pet peeves is the anti-Asian bias generated by the extraordinary numbers of Asians who come here for abs and other seafood. You'll recall, perhaps, I wrote an article on this awhile ago for Advocate-Beacon and it's near to or at the top of our blog at www.mendoabwatch.com . 98% of MAW is non-Asian. I think we have an affirmative obligation to call people on racist slurs and keep the record straight. Example: I caught two violators this weekend, both were white. Last weekend, I found four experienced divers at Gordon Lane all with untagged abs and ‘sorting’ them on a pickup tailgate; none bothered tagging at the beach and their containers were now mixed. Sunday, Will and I got a fellow at Glass Beach, he was Asian. Proportionately, I am seeing a lower rate of apparent violation by Asians than whites. Certainly I find a better attitude and willingness to discuss and/or display their catch than with white folks. Yet it's the white divers and our fellow white residents who are constantly bad-mouthing those damn Asian divers. This is one thing that caused me to launch Mendocino Ab Watch. My nextdoor neighbor publicly printed a letter to the editor about Asians raping our coast of its resources. Seems to me, if anybody buys their tags and follows the rules, we can't complain — even if they are Asian. So why do we hear it? Because they look different and babble among themselves in a foreign tongue. Pretty poor excuse for us, I think. I stopped good ole Bobby Beacon (Elk Fire — his own personal department — really) at Little River Inn as he began just such a tirade. I'm drawing some lines in a friendly but firm way, and trying to counter this racism. And ask yourselves, who are the very few divers who rail against us and against the regulations? They've always been the white folks, in my experience. Enough said. Thanks for indulging me. I appreciate your patience.”