Sun May Be Setting on Sea Captain’s Way of Life

At this stage of his life, Pete Dupuy should be easing into retirement. He should be looking toward unhurried days, doting on his 12 grandchildren and waking up each morning next to his wife.

Instead, the 65-year-old fisherman has spent the better part of three months alone, sleeping on a narrow cot in a cabin on his boat. After more than 30 years at sea, Dupuy is spending what’s left of his savings refitting a pair of boats so he can start over.

Most of what he’d saved was spent paying the lawyers hired to wage an uphill battle with the federal government after it proposed closing a rich fishing ground off the coast of Cape Cod. He’d spent close to 20 years long-lining swordfish there, off a rocky shoal called Georges Bank. He’d fish there half the year, then return home to California to troll the waters off the Ventura County coast for everything from rockfish to shrimp.

Fighting to keep it open was a battle of attrition that Dupuy was destined to lose. The government and environmentalists, claiming that a once-rich fishing area was badly depleted, eventually won. Dupuy was left to manage as best he could.

“This isn’t exactly where I wanted to be right now,” he said. “Looking back on it now, I wish I’d left it alone . . . There was no way we could have beat [the government] on it.”

Since February, Dupuy has been overseeing the work being done on his boats at Ventura Harbor. On one, a hard-chined whaleback called the Ventura II, he installed a new freezer to preserve the albacore he hopes will be caught during a three-month voyage to the western Pacific. On the Karen Marie, a trawler named for his wife, he’s refitting to seine squid off the Channel Islands.

If all goes well, Dupuy said he’s hoping to profit enough over the next few years to leave the business altogether.

If the investment fails, there won’t be many options left.

“I’ve got nothing to do but throw the dice,” he said, looking out at the harbor quay from the wheelhouse of the Ventura II. “If I lose, I lose, but I can’t think of that right now . . . I’ll just have to see how this all comes down.”

Dupuy’s situation is not uncommon among the thinning ranks of California fishermen. Though the waters off the coast are home to the nation’s fourth-largest fishery, generating about $800 million a year, those who still draw their living from the depths are beset by problems.

It has always been a tough business, dependent on factors fishermen say only God can change. Subtle variations in water temperature, a late afternoon wind change and cloudy weather can all keep the fleet in port and idle.

That’s the nature of the business, and Dupuy accepts it graciously. It’s the other, rather recent problems, that have him worried.

Fish are no longer as plentiful. Climatic shifts have turned some fisheries on their heads. Foreign competitors are grabbing ever larger slices of the market, and increasing industry regulation has made it difficult for some to post a profit.

All this, combined with the danger and hardship of fishing, has devastated a way of life that, 50 years ago, was the lifeblood of towns like San Pedro, Monterey and San Francisco.

“Fishing is hard work, but it was simple work,” Dupuy said. “It’s not much like that anymore. . . . There’s so much other stuff you’ve got to keep an eye on and worry about that you can’t just think about fishing.”

Ask some fishermen what they think of Dupuy and they’ll likely shoot back descriptions like “a good man,” “fair” and “honest.” That’s high praise from men notorious for their cutthroat tactics, bitter rivalries and all-around acrimony.

Maybe it’s because Dupuy is a little different from other rough-hewn men who make their living from the sea.

Standing a few inches under 6 feet, Dupuy certainly looks the part. He is solid, with wide shoulders, a barrel chest and thick arms. His face is round and full and framed by a clipped gray beard. He wears his hair long and pulls it back in a ponytail. His eyes are watery blue and surrounded by spidery wrinkles set deep into his fair skin.

He doesn’t use the sandpaper vernacular associated with the docks, and is instead thoughtful, concise and polite. When he does swear, there is hesitation.

Dupuy is competitive, but understands that the well-being of those moored nearby is important to his success. He has tried to rally other fishermen to join together and fight for their common interests. He organized both the Ventura County Commercial Fishermen’s and the Pacific Offshore Fishermen’s associations to present a united front to those who would close the ocean to fishing.

“You know, I probably wouldn’t be too bad of a politician,” he said. “I can talk to people and get them thinking, but with fishermen it’s a little harder. . . . It’s just like Steinbeck said, they’ve got blinders on or something.”

In his 1945 narrative “The Log From the Sea of Cortez,” novelist John Steinbeck wrote of a week when the world convulsed. Nazi troops had marched into Denmark and Norway. France had fallen and the vaunted Maginot Line lay in ruins.

“We didn’t know it,” he wrote. “But we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles.”

It’s still like that, Dupuy said. Fishermen live in a world whose boundaries end at the gunwales of their boats. They are oblivious to everything else and come together only when it’s too late.

“That’s part of the reason why it’s gotten to this point,” he said. “We haven’t gotten together to put up a really good fight.”

Dupuy grew up in Southern California. An infant when his father died, he was raised by his mother in a small Topanga Canyon home.

He got his first taste of fishing while still a boy. He accompanied a pair of Greeks for a day of fishing in the Santa Monica Bay aboard a shallow-bottomed skiff. The simplicity of the work impressed him. It seemed noble and good to be far offshore in the great expanse of the ocean, rolling with the swells under a hot sun.

“It’s real,” he said. “When the water splashes you on the face, you feel free, you feel close to nature.”

For the next few decades Dupuy moved in and out of fishing, occasionally working on a boat when he wasn’t pursuing his passion for off-road motorcycle racing. In the 1950s and ‘60s, fishing meant extra cash, which he used to supplement income earned from selling Harley-Davidsons at a San Fernando Valley shop.

It wasn’t until 1968 that Dupuy began fishing full time.

He worked on boats up and down the East and West Coasts. He even worked spotting fish from planes, until the state outlawed the practice. Dupuy said somebody complained it wasn’t fair to the fish.

“People thought it was some kind of game we were playing out there,” he said. “But it was work, a profession, but nobody seemed to understand that. They saw it as a sport.”

Despite all its hardship, fishing was good to Dupuy. He earned enough to purchase three boats and a comfortable home in Tarzana. He had a reputation for being a good captain, able to find fat schools of tuna, mackerel and swordfish, and for always paying his workers fairly.

He had money in the bank and looked forward to a time when somebody younger could take over the business.

But over the last decade things have changed.

In 1994, the New England Fishery Management Council drastically curtailed fishing on Georges Bank--a 12,000-square-mile rock plateau 100 miles offshore--to restore depleted stocks of swordfish, haddock, cod, flounder and other ground fish.

Fish stocks had dwindled over the years, the government said, due to a combination of overfishing and natural causes.

Conservationists also contended the area was in the migratory path of the endangered right whale and should be closed to fishing to ensure their safe passage to the south Atlantic.

The Georges Bank fight drained Dupuy’s financial reserves.

Meanwhile, permit fees have increased, some by more than 1,000%, and there is talk of closing places like the Channel Islands to fishing. Catch quotas have given everyone involved in the industry a smaller slice of the pie because they limit total annual fish landings but not the number of boats.

There aren’t as many fish left, and foreign competitors, who often operate without regulation, are scooping up increasing shares of the market.

“The business has totally changed,” Dupuy said. “It’s not anything like it was back in the 1970s or ‘80s . . . It’s just gotten harder.”

Though he doesn’t say so, Dupuy seems anxious to get to sea.

The refits have taken so much time, he said, that it’s like living in limbo.

Instead of filling his holds, he’s handing out his credit cards and writing checks to purchase materials to finish the work.

“I’ve gotten to a point where I’m not really sure how much money I’ve spent and I don’t really want to know,” he said. “I should be nervous about all this, but I’m not. . . . I just want to get out and get back to work.”

What doesn’t worry Dupuy worries Karen, his wife of almost 30 years.

For the past several years, Karen has worked with Dupuy, keeping the books and handling the business end of her husband’s work. She worries about him working too much. She’s concerned about the future, the unknown and the tragic turn of events that seem to occur all too frequently to fishermen.

“I don’t know what will happen if all this doesn’t work,” she said. “I mean, what would happen if we lost one of the boats or something happened to Pete.”

Although he’s starting over, Dupuy has a lot on his side.

He’s healthy. He has the kind of experience to know whether to fish a certain area just by looking at the color of the water.

He has a pool of good crew members and, most important, he has the unflinching conviction that he will succeed.

“I honestly can’t tell you where I’ll be a year from now, but things will probably work out,” Dupuy said. “Like I said, I don’t know what I’d do if they didn’t work, so I’m just going to have to make sure they do.”