Collecting the fish - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 218

mon there. I had, however, collected a number of them, along with
soupfin sharks, in San Francisco Bay for Steinhart's Fish Roundabout.
The sevengills are found in San Francisco Bay on a fairly regular ba-
sis, but the soupfins were occasional and highly unpredictable visitors.
Unfortunately, while I was at Steinhart a sport and commercial fish-
ery for sevengills had opened up, and in a relatively short period of
time there was a noticeable decline in both their numbers and their
sizes.
Clearly, if we wanted a good chance of collecting large sevengills,
we needed to look elsewhere. Dave Ebert (son of Earl Ebert, whom
I had dived with during my Marineland days) had just completed his
master's thesis on the biology of sevengill sharks in California and
South Africa. He put me in touch with Ken Bates, a commercial fisher-
man from Eureka, California, who had helped Ebert gather data for
his study.
I called Ken and then, in June 1984, flew up to Eureka to check out
the logistics of collecting sevengills there. Ken said that during the
summer months large sevengills six to eight feet in length show up
regularly in Humboldt Bay. He'd caught them then and had seen them
chasing bat rays over the shallow mud flats. The situation looked very
good for collecting. Ken had a fine herring gillnet boat he had built
himself that we could use. Additionally, a convenient dock was avail-
able for transferring the sharks from his boat to our trucks. The ma-
rine lab at Humboldt State University helped by agreeing to let us fill
our transport tanks with their nice clean, filtered water rather than
using the murky water of Humboldt Bay and then having to filter it
ourselves.
The following month, Bob Kiwala, Neil Allen, aquarist Gilbert Van
Dykhuizen, and I drove up to Eureka in two trucks. The morning af-
ter we arrived we headed out with Ken in his boat to put out the set-
lines in Humboldt Bay. He used a method similar to one I'd used with
Gerry Klay in the Florida Keys to collect lemon and nurse sharks: each
line consisted of a single weight for an anchor, a fifteen-foot leader and
baited hook, and a line going up to a float.
We'd brought boxes of frozen salmon heads for bait. The heads were
split in two and half a head was put on each of fifteen lines. Return-