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Fish and Game wardens in South Bay cast an eye seaward for ocean exploiters.
By Josh Grossberg
DAILY BREEZE
Except for the stars in the sky and the tiny bursts of white froth in the water, all is dark. With no clouds overhead, even the horizon vanishes. And with only the dashboard illuminated, John Potter's small boat is invisible from just a few feet away.
It's a cold winter night, but Potter wears no gloves as he holds the skiff's frigid metallic wheel. He's never needed to reach for his gun before, but he's isolated out on the black ocean and he needs to keep his fingers unencumbered just in case.
He's only a quarter mile from shore, but it's quiet and deserted. Even the seals, who barked as he left the dock in Redondo Beach, are keeping still now.
Every few minutes, Potter spies something gleaming in the distance -- another boat -- so he slows the skiff to a standstill and holds a pair of night-vision goggles to his eyes.
After a few minutes, satisfied with what he sees, Potter revs the engine and heads off again, leaving a trail of choppy water in his wake. His quarry never knew they were being watched.
Operations aren't always covert. Sometimes Potter will approach another craft, flashing his lights as he nears.
"Department of Fish and Game," he announces to the startled men in fishing boats.
Potter is a warden with the California Department of Fish and Game and on this night he's looking for lobster poachers. He glides across the water at more than 30 mph to Marina del Rey before doubling back to the dark recesses of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
He stops to talk with the passengers of a few boats, and, like a good cop, disarms them with friendly chitchat, even as he searches the contents of their lockers.
If they have any trappings of fishing -- ice chests, poles, bait -- he can climb aboard and conduct a search, no warrant needed.
Are they licensed? Are they catching their prey legally? Do they have too many? If he finds a lobster that's too small or a protected fish, he'll confiscate it and write a citation.
"People tend to want what they can't have," Potter said.
It's too cold, the poachers don't venture out and it turns out to be a fairly uneventful night. Potter is slightly annoyed, but knows that by being out there and making surprise stops -- or even by hiding in the dark -- he's acting as a deterrent for those who want to exploit the state's wild animals.
Potter has no sympathy for those who break the rules. The ocean may seem to offer limitless resources, but he knows that the sea houses a delicate balance of life that can quickly be upturned by aggressive hunting.
The rules can be arcane, but for Potter it's like driving a car. If you're going to do it, you better know how.
"Fish and hunting is a privilege," he said. "You have to know the rules. It's all part of the food chain. By removing too many of something, something else might starve out."
With its vast coastline, thousands of lakes and miles of forests and deserts, California is home to thousands of protected plants and animals. It's the job of the state's 352 Fish and Game wardens to protect them. Potter's terrain is the Southern Coastal District. He and his colleagues, Rebecca Hartman and Mike Norris, are the only three wardens to canvas an area that covers much of Los Angeles and Orange counties, although another two are now in training.
Wardens work out of their homes and drive their green pickup where and when they're needed, which is often in the middle of the night, when poachers try to lurk unseen.
It's a job that requires patience as much as a love for the outdoors. To cite a poacher, a warden has to catch them in the act, which means hiding and waiting and peering through binoculars. Sometimes it can take days before a thief returns to a trap and wardens have to be there when it happens.
For Potter, that means going just about anywhere. In recent weeks, he has been to Los Angeles International Airport when 74 freshwater stingrays were discovered being smuggled into the state. The department normally handles only indigenous species, but these fish were deemed too dangerous for the local habitat to set free, so it fell upon the wardens to see they were destroyed.
He has also been to Catalina Island when the body of a bullet-ridden sea lion was found, and to Angeles National Forrest to monitor deer hunters. On another occasion, he and his colleagues conducted a sting operation when they learned that someone was selling bear claws as jewelry in the area.
But he spends most of his time patrolling the waters around the South Bay and keeping an eye on the bustling fish market in San Pedro.
Each and every fish that comes in needs to be accounted for, and if he finds an illegal one, he'll take it into custody. On a recent day, he found eight lingcod that were under the legal 30 inches in a warehouse, so he began the process of cataloguing them.
It's a time-consuming chore. The cod is now evidence and must be driven to Los Alamitos, where it's stored in a freezer. Then there's the paperwork, which will take Potter hours to complete. It's all time away from the patrol.
"It may seem ticky-tacky," as Potter put it, to make such a fuss about a couple of fish, but to the wardens, they're just one small piece of a much larger puzzle.
"It's just one person taking one thing, but if you think of how many people go to the beach every day, it's a big deal," Hartman said.
"Every little thing does matter and it's up to everybody to do their small part."
Hartman specializes in marine aquaria -- the fish people collect for pets or hobbies. It's not uncommon for her to spend her time studying small snails in a warehouse to make sure they're legal to sell.
"Tons of tropical fish come from Indonesia and that's fine," she said. "Those can come in. The problem we run into is when our native stuff is being taken. They're what keep our tide pools healthy. It's part of our ecosystem. You mess with one, you can ruin the whole thing."
A problem is that one fish looks just like another, so if someone has paperwork for imported garibaldi, there's no way of knowing if they are using the same receipts over and over again to sell illegal ones collected off the California shore. To thwart such efforts takes a lot of legwork.
"You have to go in one day when they have no garibaldi and track how many they sold," Hartman said. "But you're doing that while everything else is going on."
The wardens know the odds are stacked against them. But by catching a few poachers and making sure the rest know they're out there looking, the wardens try to keep on top of things the best they can.
"You can be overwhelmed," Potter said. "But if you take one day at a time and focus on one project and try to see it through, you're OK. If you have your eye on too many fires, nothing will get done."
One of his proudest achievements came last year when he helped arrest two men for catching and killing more than 200 garibaldi, the California state fish and a protected species.
Earlier this month, Obrian Vaiolo, 36, and Johnny Aliitaeao Ofisa, 36, both of Long Beach were sentenced to 250 hours of community service and three years probation. It was a sentence Potter considered light.
"I'd like to see them get six months," he said. "But I've talked to others and they think it's fair sentencing. There was no monetary fine, but if you sit down and pencil it out, 250 hours is quite a commitment."
Once the wardens do their jobs, it's up to others to follow through with prosecutions.
"We catch them and they clean them," as Potter put it.
It's not always so easy. Prosecutors can take a dim view of lobster poachers when they have wife beaters to deal with. And unlike furry animals, fish and crustaceans don't generate much good will.
"It's hard to get sympathy for a snail," Hartman said.
But they have a friend in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office. Betty Davidson takes a keen interest in what the wardens do and understands how much work they put into their investigations. For larger cases, she looks to slap violators with a fine that stings.
"We look more toward the larger violators," she said. "Usually I'm looking for 36 months and an appropriate fine. And in some cases ... you have jail. That doesn't come often, but there are people who push the limits."
Potter himself has only made a few arrests in his two years on the job. And those weren't because of poaching violations, but because he encountered other violations while running background checks on people he stopped.
To help the wardens keep track of the vast area they cover, they often rely on good relations with law-abiding anglers and hunters, who have no fondness for people avoiding rules they assiduously follow.
"It's a love-hate relationship," Potter said. "They don't want to have anything to do with you, but then someone starts to steal lobsters out of their traps and you get a call."
Tommy Holmes has spent years boating in the waters of the Santa Monica Bay catching lobster and has come into contact with Potter several times. Holmes said he doesn't mind the intrusion and is glad to help if it will help put a dent in poaching, which he said hurts anglers following the rules.
"To me, it's good," said the Mar Vista resident, who encountered Potter during his nighttime surveillance. "There are so many violators out there, more power to them. The fishing has gotten so popular that there's no choice but to regulate it. If it makes the fishing better for my kids, then that's what you have to do."
It might be tempting to take a lobster that's just a few inches too small, but Holmes said it's not worth the hassle.
"You just never know when you're going to get pulled over," he said. "If you're smart, you don't mess around. It's a karma thing. You can't be pulling shenanigans like that."
It may come as a surprise that Potter is an avid sportsman and enjoys lobster fishing himself. The 35-year-old native of Catalina Island ran a restaurant with his wife in Long Beach before following his dream a few years ago. It's a decision he never regrets, especially when he catches someone doing something they're not supposed to do.
"The ones I really enjoy are catching the guys with lobster," he said.
"They shoot them with spears. I find them hidden in cars, in spare tires. You have to watch them and put it together. You have to sit on them with a scope. They're sneaky about it."
He's especially eager to thwart people who catch lobster during the off season when females become pregnant.
"Some people might look at it and think it's only four lobsters, what's the big deal? But if they're female and have 50,000 eggs, it is a big deal."
And so, carrying his binoculars, he heads out to sea on cold nights and camps out along the empty cliffs on long, lonely days.
And he waits.
By Josh Grossberg
DAILY BREEZE
Except for the stars in the sky and the tiny bursts of white froth in the water, all is dark. With no clouds overhead, even the horizon vanishes. And with only the dashboard illuminated, John Potter's small boat is invisible from just a few feet away.
It's a cold winter night, but Potter wears no gloves as he holds the skiff's frigid metallic wheel. He's never needed to reach for his gun before, but he's isolated out on the black ocean and he needs to keep his fingers unencumbered just in case.
He's only a quarter mile from shore, but it's quiet and deserted. Even the seals, who barked as he left the dock in Redondo Beach, are keeping still now.
Every few minutes, Potter spies something gleaming in the distance -- another boat -- so he slows the skiff to a standstill and holds a pair of night-vision goggles to his eyes.
After a few minutes, satisfied with what he sees, Potter revs the engine and heads off again, leaving a trail of choppy water in his wake. His quarry never knew they were being watched.
Operations aren't always covert. Sometimes Potter will approach another craft, flashing his lights as he nears.
"Department of Fish and Game," he announces to the startled men in fishing boats.
Potter is a warden with the California Department of Fish and Game and on this night he's looking for lobster poachers. He glides across the water at more than 30 mph to Marina del Rey before doubling back to the dark recesses of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
He stops to talk with the passengers of a few boats, and, like a good cop, disarms them with friendly chitchat, even as he searches the contents of their lockers.
If they have any trappings of fishing -- ice chests, poles, bait -- he can climb aboard and conduct a search, no warrant needed.
Are they licensed? Are they catching their prey legally? Do they have too many? If he finds a lobster that's too small or a protected fish, he'll confiscate it and write a citation.
"People tend to want what they can't have," Potter said.
It's too cold, the poachers don't venture out and it turns out to be a fairly uneventful night. Potter is slightly annoyed, but knows that by being out there and making surprise stops -- or even by hiding in the dark -- he's acting as a deterrent for those who want to exploit the state's wild animals.
Potter has no sympathy for those who break the rules. The ocean may seem to offer limitless resources, but he knows that the sea houses a delicate balance of life that can quickly be upturned by aggressive hunting.
The rules can be arcane, but for Potter it's like driving a car. If you're going to do it, you better know how.
"Fish and hunting is a privilege," he said. "You have to know the rules. It's all part of the food chain. By removing too many of something, something else might starve out."
With its vast coastline, thousands of lakes and miles of forests and deserts, California is home to thousands of protected plants and animals. It's the job of the state's 352 Fish and Game wardens to protect them. Potter's terrain is the Southern Coastal District. He and his colleagues, Rebecca Hartman and Mike Norris, are the only three wardens to canvas an area that covers much of Los Angeles and Orange counties, although another two are now in training.
Wardens work out of their homes and drive their green pickup where and when they're needed, which is often in the middle of the night, when poachers try to lurk unseen.
It's a job that requires patience as much as a love for the outdoors. To cite a poacher, a warden has to catch them in the act, which means hiding and waiting and peering through binoculars. Sometimes it can take days before a thief returns to a trap and wardens have to be there when it happens.
For Potter, that means going just about anywhere. In recent weeks, he has been to Los Angeles International Airport when 74 freshwater stingrays were discovered being smuggled into the state. The department normally handles only indigenous species, but these fish were deemed too dangerous for the local habitat to set free, so it fell upon the wardens to see they were destroyed.
He has also been to Catalina Island when the body of a bullet-ridden sea lion was found, and to Angeles National Forrest to monitor deer hunters. On another occasion, he and his colleagues conducted a sting operation when they learned that someone was selling bear claws as jewelry in the area.
But he spends most of his time patrolling the waters around the South Bay and keeping an eye on the bustling fish market in San Pedro.
Each and every fish that comes in needs to be accounted for, and if he finds an illegal one, he'll take it into custody. On a recent day, he found eight lingcod that were under the legal 30 inches in a warehouse, so he began the process of cataloguing them.
It's a time-consuming chore. The cod is now evidence and must be driven to Los Alamitos, where it's stored in a freezer. Then there's the paperwork, which will take Potter hours to complete. It's all time away from the patrol.
"It may seem ticky-tacky," as Potter put it, to make such a fuss about a couple of fish, but to the wardens, they're just one small piece of a much larger puzzle.
"It's just one person taking one thing, but if you think of how many people go to the beach every day, it's a big deal," Hartman said.
"Every little thing does matter and it's up to everybody to do their small part."
Hartman specializes in marine aquaria -- the fish people collect for pets or hobbies. It's not uncommon for her to spend her time studying small snails in a warehouse to make sure they're legal to sell.
"Tons of tropical fish come from Indonesia and that's fine," she said. "Those can come in. The problem we run into is when our native stuff is being taken. They're what keep our tide pools healthy. It's part of our ecosystem. You mess with one, you can ruin the whole thing."
A problem is that one fish looks just like another, so if someone has paperwork for imported garibaldi, there's no way of knowing if they are using the same receipts over and over again to sell illegal ones collected off the California shore. To thwart such efforts takes a lot of legwork.
"You have to go in one day when they have no garibaldi and track how many they sold," Hartman said. "But you're doing that while everything else is going on."
The wardens know the odds are stacked against them. But by catching a few poachers and making sure the rest know they're out there looking, the wardens try to keep on top of things the best they can.
"You can be overwhelmed," Potter said. "But if you take one day at a time and focus on one project and try to see it through, you're OK. If you have your eye on too many fires, nothing will get done."
One of his proudest achievements came last year when he helped arrest two men for catching and killing more than 200 garibaldi, the California state fish and a protected species.
Earlier this month, Obrian Vaiolo, 36, and Johnny Aliitaeao Ofisa, 36, both of Long Beach were sentenced to 250 hours of community service and three years probation. It was a sentence Potter considered light.
"I'd like to see them get six months," he said. "But I've talked to others and they think it's fair sentencing. There was no monetary fine, but if you sit down and pencil it out, 250 hours is quite a commitment."
Once the wardens do their jobs, it's up to others to follow through with prosecutions.
"We catch them and they clean them," as Potter put it.
It's not always so easy. Prosecutors can take a dim view of lobster poachers when they have wife beaters to deal with. And unlike furry animals, fish and crustaceans don't generate much good will.
"It's hard to get sympathy for a snail," Hartman said.
But they have a friend in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office. Betty Davidson takes a keen interest in what the wardens do and understands how much work they put into their investigations. For larger cases, she looks to slap violators with a fine that stings.
"We look more toward the larger violators," she said. "Usually I'm looking for 36 months and an appropriate fine. And in some cases ... you have jail. That doesn't come often, but there are people who push the limits."
Potter himself has only made a few arrests in his two years on the job. And those weren't because of poaching violations, but because he encountered other violations while running background checks on people he stopped.
To help the wardens keep track of the vast area they cover, they often rely on good relations with law-abiding anglers and hunters, who have no fondness for people avoiding rules they assiduously follow.
"It's a love-hate relationship," Potter said. "They don't want to have anything to do with you, but then someone starts to steal lobsters out of their traps and you get a call."
Tommy Holmes has spent years boating in the waters of the Santa Monica Bay catching lobster and has come into contact with Potter several times. Holmes said he doesn't mind the intrusion and is glad to help if it will help put a dent in poaching, which he said hurts anglers following the rules.
"To me, it's good," said the Mar Vista resident, who encountered Potter during his nighttime surveillance. "There are so many violators out there, more power to them. The fishing has gotten so popular that there's no choice but to regulate it. If it makes the fishing better for my kids, then that's what you have to do."
It might be tempting to take a lobster that's just a few inches too small, but Holmes said it's not worth the hassle.
"You just never know when you're going to get pulled over," he said. "If you're smart, you don't mess around. It's a karma thing. You can't be pulling shenanigans like that."
It may come as a surprise that Potter is an avid sportsman and enjoys lobster fishing himself. The 35-year-old native of Catalina Island ran a restaurant with his wife in Long Beach before following his dream a few years ago. It's a decision he never regrets, especially when he catches someone doing something they're not supposed to do.
"The ones I really enjoy are catching the guys with lobster," he said.
"They shoot them with spears. I find them hidden in cars, in spare tires. You have to watch them and put it together. You have to sit on them with a scope. They're sneaky about it."
He's especially eager to thwart people who catch lobster during the off season when females become pregnant.
"Some people might look at it and think it's only four lobsters, what's the big deal? But if they're female and have 50,000 eggs, it is a big deal."
And so, carrying his binoculars, he heads out to sea on cold nights and camps out along the empty cliffs on long, lonely days.
And he waits.
