A first look at realism - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 39

from the Sea of Cortez. The tank, high and narrow from front to back,
was too deep to e¤ectively clean the glass with a pole from the top, so
to do a good job required diving in a very cramped space. Although
the tank was attractive, space constraints made it barely wide enough
for a diver to fit between the front glass and the back rockwork. The
banquet room's ten-thousand-gallon aquarium exhibited southern
California game fishes. For it we collected a nice school of yellowtail,
some leopard sharks, sheephead, and a couple of large black sea bass.
The two tanks behind the bar were designed to show striking con-
trasts in color. One had dark volcanic rockwork with pure-white pow-
der pu¤ sea anemones and bright red rockfishes. The other tank had
large red Tealia sea anemones with contrasting silvery surfperch. Those
two tanks were quite attractive but led to some interesting collecting
adventures. In particular, we had to collect enough colorful red rockfish
to create the color contrast with the white sea anemones.
Milt Shedd, chairman of the board of Sea World and an expert an-
gler, kindly o¤ered the use of his sixty-seven-foot sportfishing boat,
appropriately named Sea World. Several times Milt took us to Santa
Catalina and San Clemente Islands to collect rockfish.
We'd developed a technique by which, theoretically at least, we could
successfully collect live rockfish from as deep as three hundred feet.
We knew from past experience that fish brought to the surface from
that depth wouldn't survive even when their swimbladders were
deflated with a hypodermic needle at the surface. The new plan was
to catch the fish on a multihook, squid-baited drop line. As soon as
the line was lowered to just above the bottom, we would get bites. When
we judged that several fish were hooked, we would reel it up until a
mark on the line indicated that the hooks and fish were hanging at
about one hundred feet. We would then dive down and deflate their
swimbladders at the hundred-foot stop, and then again at another shal-
lower stop on the way up to the boat.
Bob Kiwala, collector for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, had
designed and constructed a nice heavy rockfish line on a large and easy-
to-use spool. We didn't like monofilament fishing line because it's
di‹cult to see underwater and we were nervous diving next to an al-
most invisible line with numerous hooks moving up and down with