I’ve come to expect certain things, working at this magazine. Certain writers (who will remain anonymous) will always have to be hounded for their assignments right up until the last possible moment before press time. With others, if I’ve got a question about the copy they sent me (you want me to print that the yellowtail weighed HOW much?) I’m going to have to leave multiple voicemails, send daily emails, and cross my fingers they’ll get back to me. I’ve come to accept this. With Ed Ries, who writes our Looking Astern column and the occasional feature, this is not the case. Like clockwork, his column arrives in my inbox, on time and ready to go.
Could be that his punctuality was drilled into him through his military career. Ries served in the Navy from pre-World War II, and through the Cold War. Or maybe it’s a generational thing. While many Baby Boomers still struggle with things like attaching files to an email, it never fails to impress me that Ed Ries, born in 1919, scans in his photos and sends in electronically the files for his column each month. There’s a reason they call them Greatest Generation; Ed gets it done – not for recognition – but because it’s the right thing to do.
So when Bill DePriest, the publisher here at PCS, came up with the idea for a biographical feature on Ed Ries, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to get to know a little about the man behind Looking Astern. We arranged a meeting at Ed’s home in San Diego, and in the meantime I picked up a copy of Ed’s book, Tales of the Golden Years of California Ocean Fishing, 1900-1950. It provides a one-of-a-kind look, through Ed’s point of view, into the unique history of California’s saltwater fishing.
“There’s no book like it,” says Ries. “I lived a lot of that stuff.”
His venture into the world of ocean fishing began at the Santa Monica Pier, the site that would be the future home to many more angling adventures. There, in 1930, eleven-year-old Ed, along with his father and a rented bamboo pole, caught queenfish, sardines, and jacksmelt in quantity.
“He wasn’t a dedicated fisherman like I became,” says Ries. “He enjoyed it, but he was worried about making a living in those days. He introduced me to fishing on the pier. They had poles with a snag-line you could rent for fifty cents. They were very crude; they had sidewinder reels, and you would just drop it down and wiggle the rod up and down on the top of the pier railing. Fish were small – seldom over eight or ten inches. The thing was we’d take all that little junk we caught home, and my dad would clean it. Sometimes we had a flour sack full of them, and my mother would fry them up, and we’d eat them. They were very bony.”
Nonetheless, young Ed was that day bitten by the fishing bug. “I thought that was
the greatest thing I’d ever encountered,” says Ries. When he couldn’t get out fishing, he read about it, drew pictures of it, and would spend hours browsing the tackle shops and fishing catalogs. “When we moved to Santa Monica, we lived in a tiny apartment only five short blocks from the pier. Often I’d go down after school and spend two or three hours there, and of course I fished every Saturday, every weekend, every holiday, every chance I got. I’d come home filthy and stinking of fish. Every waking moment I’d spend down there, and it came to a point where my mother became distressed. She was worried that I’d become a ‘wharf rat.’ But it didn’t discourage me.”
In fact, during those Depression days, fish were welcomed by Ed’s mother to supplement the family’s food menu. “Hard times and cheap protein,” says Ries. “You ate what you could get.” At the age of 14, he was fishing six days a week in summer, sometimes making more money than his father. “There were no limits in size or quantity of fish, and everybody was so desperate to make a few pennies, people would peddle fish. People would come down to the pier to see if they could buy some. We’d sell a big log barracuda for twenty-five cents. They were a great market fish in those days – everybody ate them. It was nothing to go out on the boats and catch twenty or thirty barracuda on a half-day trip, and more on an all-day.
Things have changed so much. At that time every beach city had a pier, and every one of them had a fleet of sport boats. So it was a lot different then,” says Ries. “The thing was, the people involved – the older people, the skippers, tolerated us.” I ask Ed about one of the adventures that he described in his book. When he was about 16, Ed and his buddy Harold Gingerich, armed with handlines and 30 pounds of mussels they’d collected, launched Ed’s 14-foot skiff and rowed out beyond the pier. There, they rendezvoused with a captain of a sport boat who had agreed to tow them over to a hot spot – about 15 miles out. “We took some incredible risks. We had no water or food, no hats or sweaters, no motor, no lifejackets. We were very brash and cocky. Like teenagers are.” Says Ries.
Their parents knew they were going fishing, but had no clue to the risks they were taking. Having arranged with the captain to pick them up on the way back, the boys began chumming with the crushed mussels. A school of sheephead appeared under the skiff. Over the course of an hour, they handlined in fish up to 25 pounds, filling the bottom of the skiff, until suddenly – as if someone had thrown a switch – the bite turned off. The school vanished. They looked around, puzzled. Longer than the skiff, a gigantic shark appeared under the boat and then surfaced alongside. “I’d never even heard of a white shark at that time, so I’m not sure what it was, but it very possibly was a great white. It was sure big enough to scare the hell out of us,” says Ries.
“That’s an adventure that just couldn’t happen these days, and I feel very lucky that I was able to have those kinds of adventures – and that I lived through them without getting drowned,” admits Ries.
It would not be the last time Ed Ries would know danger. After working as a deckhand and bait hauler on a sportfishing boat, he obtained his first vessel master’s license in 1938 and then fished commercially for a time. “In the summer of 1940, I was working at Newport Beach. There were three canneries there then. I was living on a boat, living on hamburgers,” Ries says, a smile coming to his face. “I’d wash my clothes in salt water.
I was pretty poor for a while there,” he says, laughing.
“In the spring of 1940, France fell,” Ries says, his tone growing pensive. “Then the Germans started the blitz on London.” At this point in the conversation, Ed Ries pauses, seems distant.
“When France fell, and England was on her knees,” he continues, “I, along with a lot of other people, thought ‘Well, we’re not going to see Britain go down, so we’re going to be in the war.’ I wanted to make sure I was in the Navy, so I joined the Naval Reserve in July of 1940 and was called up to active duty in October.”
Hanging on the wall of Ed’s study are many black-and-white framed photos of different Naval vessels he has served in. “This is my first ship in the Navy – that’s a minesweeper,” he says, pointing at one of them. “And this is the support ship I was on when they were doing atom-bomb tests,” Ries says.
I ask him what that was like. “It was horrendous. That’ll put the fear of God into you! I saw the largest hydrogen bomb the US ever tested. Out in Eniwetok and Bikini during the 1950s.”
Still, places like Eniwetok Atoll, in the western Pacific Ocean, did provide an opportunity for some make-do fishing for a fishing fanatic like Ed Ries. During the war, faced with months of arduous duties and few recreational facilities, “Those of us who were dedicated an-glers looked for ways to reduce the fish population,” Ries says.
A tropical lagoon that was swarming with fish was more than Ed could resist. He fashioned a rod from some pup-tent poles, built a small boat of boxwood, made some plywood oars, and he paddled out to where the big ones lived.
I ask Ed what kind of reaction his comrades had as they watched him shove off in his improvised ark. “They thought I was nuts!” he laughs. “Scrap lumber from crates! I wanted to go fishing so badly that I built that damn thing. It was enough to get me out fifty yards in the lagoon. Later on I was able to get friendly with a parachute rigger, and he gave me a little portable aviator’s life raft. That was easier than monkeying around with that wooden thing. The rest of my Navy career, whenever the opportunity permitted, I’d be fishing. I’d take leave and work on commercial or sport boats.”
In ’47, after discharge, Ries resumed commercial fishing. “I was a Petty Offi-cer, first class, but the Navy had done so much over-promoting during hostilities that my prospects for making chief were very dim at that point, so I left, but I re-enlisted in the Reserve.”
Around that time he also attended art school on the G.I. Bill. “Ever since I was a kid, I liked to draw,” says Ries. “I had a little training when I was about ten years old, but I didn’t like that too much because they wanted me to paint cabbages and stuff.” Ries says, bringing out a worn binder containing many of his old sketches, some dating back to when he was a kid. “But you can see what I was thinking about all the time – fish, fish, fish. Or football.” Over the years, many of his sketches and paintings have appeared in his column.
“After I’d been out [of the Navy] for four years, the Korean War broke out, and they started to mobilize, so I went back in the Navy.” Eventually Ries went on to make Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate, which is the top en-listed rank a Navy man can attain. In 1966, he retired from the Navy and for 15 years worked as a captain of yachts, charter boats, and party fishing boats. Ries took up art again in ’77, maritime and fishing being the predominant subjects.
It was about that time that he started an intensive research into California’s fishing heritage, accumulating photos and materials on the subject from many sources. In 1981, drawing on personal experience and his research, Ries began writing a monthly column on the historical aspects of ocean fishing for a magazine called South Coast Sportfishing, (now Pacific Coast Sportfishing). Look- ing Astern and various feature stories by Ed Ries have now appeared in every issue of the magazine since that year.
I ask Ed about some of the differences he sees in today’s commercial fishing industry. “There are no new people entering the commercial fishing industry. The only guys that are still doing it are old timers, and they’re a dying breed, and they’re dropping off like flies. In another ten years there won’t be any commercial fishing – you know, maybe a couple hundred in the whole state. There’re still a few salmon fisherman, but you know what happened to the salmon this year – they’ve closed it altogether. So those guys are all going to starve this winter. And a lot of them will quit and get a job ashore or just retire. Every time something like that happens, the population of commercial fishermen drops again. And it’s already way down compared to what it used to be.”
When I ask his thoughts on some people’s negative opinions on the future of ocean fishing, and why that might be, he says, “I don’t want to come off as some wise-ass who knows everything about fishing. I haven’t felt that way since I was a teenager,” I press the issue a further, until Ed finally concedes.
“There’re a lot of reasons for it,” Ries says. “Starting with World War Two, people began moving out here for defense jobs. The population and the number of fisherman have tripled since the thirties. A big difference is that tackle nowadays is so much more efficient than it was then. Monofilament hadn’t been invented. Reels are like jewels now. Everything is different. Now there’re only two places in Santa Monica Bay that have sportfishing. But the number of people fishing now puts on a lot of pressure. So that’s part of it.
But it isn’t all that. There’re environmental things responsible for it too. There’re cycles that are natural, that don’t have anything to do with who’s fishing. There’s ample evidence that these cycles have been going on forever. There’ve been drastic changes in fishing in California that have very little to do with people. For example, there used to be a major market fish back in the 1890s called the Monterey Spanish mackerel, which is a semi-tropical fish, but it was abundant in Monterey Bay, and they suddenly disappeared – and I mean disappeared completely, and the only place to catch them now is down in the Sea of Cortez. It was caused by something natural. Back in those days they didn’t know what El Niños were. In my own opinion they had a prolonged El Niño, and those fish migrated up and established a population there, and as soon as the cold water returned, they disappeared. And you couldn’t blame it on the fishing pressure because it was all hook-and-line fishing and a relatively small number of boats.
Just like the albacore used to be so abundant in the channel right outside San Pedro to Catalina up until 1926, when all of a sudden something happened, and they didn’t show up on their yearly migration. For eight years there was a drought, and then they came back during World War Two, and ever since, they’ve been able to catch them, but it fluctuates a lot. Some years they’re pretty good, and some they don’t show up. So it’s not all human pressure.
Another very shortsighted thing is making sea lions a protected species. Sea lions destroy far more local food fish than humans. And since they’ve been protected their population has exploded. They wiped out whole runs of steelhead up in the Ballard Locks in Washington. When I was growing up, every boat had a firearm. They’re smart animals, so they got to where you didn’t actually have to shoot them, but they’d hear the gun go off, and they’d dis-appear. And now they have no fear,
and they can just ruin your fishing. So they’re contributing to a shortage of some kinds of fish.”
He continues, “I’ve heard this before – ‘Oh, you guys back then, you had no limits fishing. You raped the ocean, and you’re the reason we don’t have any fish now.’ That’s not true at all. There was a lot of fish being caught, and there was no limit, and quantity was preferable to quality in those days, mainly because of the economic pressure. Not that we were bloodthirsty or anything. It was a different time. But everybody did it. There was no social stigma as there is today.”
Ries’s first book, Tales of the Golden Years of California Ocean Fishing, 1900-1950 was first published in ’97 (expanded edition in 2007), and a second book, Fishing Barges of California, 1921-1998, appeared in 2000. There are no other books like them. In fact, a fire wiped out much of Ries’s collection of photos and memorabilia. Ed says that he
hopes someone will take up the effort to dig up the facts before they are lost forever, that perhaps other old timers will fill in some of the blanks before it is too late. “A lot of people that were around during World War Two are gone now,” says Ries. “I’m lucky to still be here, and I’m eighty-nine years old. Many old shipmates and people I’ve fished with – all dead, except that one guy, Harold Gingerich.”
At age 89, Ed Ries continues to research and record historical fishing information. In spite of physical handicaps, fishing in small boats on San Diego Bay is still possible, and Ed indulges his life-long passion whenever possible. In the past ten years, he has taken and released 10,895 sport fish by accurate count, all from the bay, using light spinning and bait-cast tackle. A large majority of these were spotted sand bass, willing biters and a favorite target. That total also includes many halibut, croakers and 188 rare bonefish.
My Biggest Fish
By Ed Ries
A question I am often asked is, “What is the biggest fish you ever caught?” The answer is found in my log entry on February 20th, 1994. It was my good fortune to be the guest of a former charter patron, Bob Fulton, fishing in his boat Audacious off the coast of Panama.
1233: A marlin rises and I toss a blue runner bait to her on the 50-pound rig. I hook up and get in the chair as the fish takes off. After a few leaps, she thrashes around, stirring up a great patch of foam and then sounds and heads for China. I settle in for a long fight and am lucky to have her on a two-speed Shimano Tiagra reel. Steve wets me down with the deck hose and plies me with cold drinks to keep my temperature down. After an hour of give-and-take, it seems that I can bring her no closer. Richard says to loosen the drag and he will try to out-maneuver the critter. He speeds the boat in a circle and positions me in front of the fish so that I am pulling from dead-ahead instead of over her shoulder. Apparently confused, the marlin is drawn close by my frantic pumps and high-gear winding. At last we see color, and she appears monstrous, unbelievably huge. A few more pumps and Steve gets the leader as Bob tries to snap photos. She flurries alongside as Steve cuts her loose close to the hook. I am still in the chair, gasping for breath. Declares Richard from the bridge, “Congratulations, Ed! It was a blue marlin and a big one, about 750 pounds.” Steve says he thought her about 800! I am in heaven! The biggest thing I have ever had on a line in 65 years of fishing.
