Sea world and south - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 70

Among the friends of the founders of Sea World was a man named
Willard Bell, of the Packard Bell electronics family. The family owned
a 110-foot diesel yacht, Five Bells, which they o¤ered to Sea World for
the collecting trip to the Cape. Willard really wanted to help and at
our request had modified the boat such that the seawater supplied to
the holding tanks below deck could be heated with water from the
engines.
On a collecting trip the previous year, Sea World sta¤ had lost many
of the more delicate tropical fish when the boat hit cold upwelling water
o¤ the west coast of Baja, just south of Ensenada. Willard's modification
was intended to reduce the risk of this happening again. The control
system was quite crude, however: it consisted of periodically sticking
a thermometer in the holding-tank water and then adjusting a valve
by hand—and hoping it was right. On the earlier trip, the fish merely
ran the risk of dying from the cold. Now we had added the possibil-
ity of cooking them.
I'd been regaled with humorous tales from the previous year's trip.
The best was a description of Milt Shedd, chairman of the board and
an avid and skilled angler, sitting on the bottom in scuba gear trying
to catch moorish idols ( Zanclus canescens ) with a tiny rod, reel, and
minute baited hook. Moorish idols, of course, graze on the tiny ani-
mals and algae that encrust the rocks. While he didn't actually catch
any, he certainly won the prize for e¤ort.
We had assembled a wide variety of collecting gear, most of which
I had never used before. We made wire fish traps and bought gill nets;
in addition, we had every conceivable type of hook, line, and sinker
(Milt was “the compleat angler”) as well as fish anesthetic, dive lights,
and, of course, my trusty underwater hand nets. With all that gear,
our enthusiasm, and some skill, we were bound to get our quarry.
Before the trip I happened to talk to Susumu Kato, a U.S. Fish and
Wildlife biologist who had spent considerable time in the Gulf and
who had written the Field Guide to the Sharks of the Eastern Pacific. I
casually mentioned that I was planning on collecting fish by night div-
ing. He told me he'd caught twenty or so sharks one night o¤ the end
of the tuna cannery pier at the Cape. Around the pier at the Cape was
right where we planned to work, and since I had never dived with sharks,