Super, spurting squid
Jumbo mollusks swarm O.C. waters, soak fishermen.
July 25, 2002
By GARY ROBBINS
The Orange County Register
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CHRIS BATTS, 13, of Long Beach holds up a jumbo squid Wednesday at the Balboa Pavilion. He and others caught some 37,000 squid in less than a week. |
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Kane Curran got hit in the kisser Wednesday by a creature whose name sounds like a finger food.
That's right, the ever tasty, always feisty and rarely seen jumbo squid have invaded Orange County coastal waters.
A 20-inch-long squid squirted Curran in the face with inky seawater as the 14-year-old Costa Mesa youth reeled the mollusk aboard the sport-fishing boat Freelance off Newport Harbor.
"It was really kind of fun," said Curran, one of hundreds of fishermen who has jammed on to charter boats since Saturday to participate in a floating free-for-all.
Jumbo squid ingest water into a body cavity, then shoot it out to propel themselves or fend off predators. Namely, fisherman bent on landing some calamari. Many anglers wear raincoats or trash bags in a usually fruitless attempt to stay dry.
"It's been a battle zone on deck, there's so much squirting going on," said Chris Gobel, skipper of Freelance.
Thien Nguyen of Fountain Valley was among the fisherman wrangling squid Wednesday.
"Reeling a squid in is like pulling a 5-gallon bucket of water out of the ocean," Nguyen said.
The strain is apparently worth the gain. At least 37,000 jumbo squid have been caught in the past six days.
It's been four years since jumbo squid have been caught in large numbers locally. An El Niño was developing at the time. Some people attributed the invasion to the warm water caused by El Niño, which might have been wrong.
"There's no El Niño now. Southern California waters have been colder than usual," said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "That's led to greater productivity in the ocean - more plankton, more squid. It's like the ecosystem is on steroids."