WHEN ANDY RUSSO SKIFFS OUT to his 78-foot purse seiner Sea Wave, moored beneath a quarter moon in Monterey Bay, the first thing he sees are dozens of eyes, glowing orange in the predatory dark. Then the din of barking sea lions fractures the night, as 75 of them leap frantically into the water from boat's net pile, stern-ramp and deck.

After boarding the boat, Russo and crew scrub for an hour with soap and bleach, searching for Sea Wave's gray deck, which lays buried beneath a gooey, black carpet of reeking dung. Finally, they head out for a night of squid fishing.

The next morning, salmon fisherman Lee Cerruti motors out from Moss Landing, a small harbour dredged from the centre of Monterey Bay's grand, crescent sweep to the north. He doesn't hope to land salmon aboard his 31-foot double-ender, Desperado. Instead, Cerruti will demonstrate the opposite - the futility of salmon trolling when 10,000-15,000 sea lions swarm the bay.

"Most of the fleet is tied up," the 66-year-old fisherman notes, gesturing to a jig-pole jungle crowding the port. "When we were catching 100 fish apiece per day and sea lions stole half of them, we could still make a living. But later in the season, when fishing slowed to 50 hookups per day, they took an even higher percentage, leaving us with about 20 fish apiece. The fewer salmon around, I suppose, the hungrier and more competitive they get. In any case, when we should have been landing 50 chinooks apiece, we had to tie up. At 20 fish, we simply couldn't make it - especially since the sea lions take so many hooks, leaders and flashers, too."

When a tiny bell on Desperado's port jig pole tinkles, Cerruti points to a spring to which the bell is attached. It's pumping, slow and hard. "Fish on," he says, "now watch this." Suddenly, the V-shaped spring distends grossly, then snaps back to the pole, lifeless and limp. "Keep watching," the skipper instructs, his eyes fixed on the vessel's wake. Moments later, a sea lion surfaces 400 feet astern with a salmon in its mouth, slapping it against the silver sea. Squawking sea gulls join the frenzy as the Desperado trolls quietly away.

The scene repeats itself several times. The sea lions meander behind the boat, then descend for a meal each time a fish is hooked. Eventually, Cerruti turns for port. Final score: Mammals 8, Desperado 0.

Harbours get hammered, too. Yacht-heavy Marina Del Rey has been inundated. In Santa Barbara, mobs of sea lions and harbour seals stormed aboard moored vessels last summer, damaging most and sinking a few. One 600-pounder strode for hours down the town's tourist strip before he was captured and returned to the sea. Locals worry about when and where sea lions will invade local marinas, as they have in Monterey and San Francisco, breaking docks and utility service boxes. They also worry about the great white sharks that sea lions might attract to popular beaches.

Further north, where the great river systems of the Pacific Northwest spawn dozens of fish runs and nourish countless square miles of coastal seas, mammals may be threatening entire stocks with extinction. "From British Columbia to Big Sur - on virtually every stream and river of the West Coast - runs of salmon, steelhead, smelt, shad and perch have been severely impacted by marine mammal predation," claims Phil Monroe, author of Mark of the Beast - a Fishermen's Guide to Marine Mammal Bites. And fish that aren't eaten, says Monroe, often arrive upriver scarred by the mauling they endured getting there. Some fishermen and guides report seeing sea lions as far as 300 miles upriver, especially on the Columbia. They say the animals are eating fish going both directions - spawners headed up and smolts headed down.

Stolen Steelhead

"For years, we've been told the problem with salmon and steelhead runs is their habitat," says Jack Harrell, former chairman of the Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project, a volunteer fish restoration group. "So we've rehabilitated streams and developed hatcheries. But hatchery returns are one-tenth of what they should be. And since 50% of our returning fish are 'raked' with claw or teeth marks from harbour seals and sea lions, it's obvious that marine mammals are eating the rest."

Harrell also cites statistics showing a decrease in coho salmon returns to San Lorenzo River (at the north end of Monterey Bay), from 1,500 fish in 1970 to 40 fish in 1990. At the same time, coastwide sea lion populations rose from 8,700 to 120,000. "This blatant loss of the coho fishery is directly tied to sea lion predation," he claims, "especially since cohos swim near the surface, where they are easily nabbed."

In addition, a study of pinniped predation in the Columbia River Basin, completed by NMFS in 1993, reported mammal scars on as much as 80% of steelhead and salmon returning to coastal hatcheries. A 1994 NMFS study put the number of "marked" spring and summer-run Snake River chinooks at nearly 20%.

In 1996, NMFS and the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission teamed up to assess seal and sea lion predation on salmon and steelhead, as well as the mammals' overall impact on coastal ecosystems. Results of the investigation are pending, though sources close to the study say it lacked the money for adequate field work and was essentially just a literature review.

One group - the Fishermen's Alliance of Monterey Bay (FAMB), an 85-member mix of sports and commercials - hopes to change regulations that encourage the expansion of marine mammal herds. FAMB's mission statement says, "Environmental imbalance created by the over-population of California sea lions has helped devastate ... migrating salmon and steelhead and has created a hazardous situation for all saltwater boat fishermen, whose safety is threatened by the actions of these aggressive mammals."

FAMB's main target is the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), a federal law that protects mammals such as sea lions, which for more than a century had been hunted for food, hide, dog chow and aphrodisiacs (genitals were sold in Asia as a cure for impotence). In bygone days, even their whiskers were used to clean opium pipes. The MMPA also ended an era of "frontier management," when fishermen simply killed sea lions that pestered them, a practice allowed, even condoned and subsidised, when states, not the feds, managed the stocks. Even through the 1950s, recalls Glen Councilman, an old-time San Pedro sardine fishermen, "we'd use five boxes of shotgun shells on sea lions a night. No big deal, just part of the job."

When the MMPA was drafted, sea lion stocks hovered at about 30,000 animals. Today, they're at 180,000 and climbing. The six-fold increase is bad enough, fishermen claim, let alone recent MMPA amendments that ban previously-allowed "lethal takes" of animals that threatened their harvests. Now, seals and sea lions can be killed only if they threaten fishermen's lives.

Fishermen may still deter mammals with devices like "seal bombs" - harmless firecrackers that explode with a loud noise and brilliant flash. But, they note, mammals habituate to seal bombs, learning to treat them like dinner bells, not destructive devices. "It's no different than the way they're drawn to engine noise, deck lights or the congregation of salmon at the mouths of rivers," says seine skipper Andy Russo. "They're not stupid. They know the signs of an easy meal."

"Allowing an uncontrolled increase in sea lion and harbour seal populations creates a runaway problem that affects fishermen and fish, including endangered runs of salmon and steelhead," contends FAMB president Russ Colwell, owner of a marine supply store in Moss Landing. "We can't avoid over-utilising fisheries if the ecosystem is manipulated to a point where fish can't survive. It's time the feds limited the mammals' growth, either by sterilisation, neutering, birth control hormones, lethal takings or the introduction of disease. If they don't, the problem will just get worse."

(Relocation of nuisance animals, fishermen claim, is not the answer. Consider, for example, when a sea lion nicknamed "Hershel" and a dozen of his steelhead-eating buddies who foraged for years at the Ballard Ship Locks in north Seattle since 1984 were captured and trucked to Santa Barbara in 1990, then released at San Miguel Island. "They nearly beat the trucks back," Colwell says, noting the animals' swift return to Ballard. "It was ridiculous." Other failed means of dislodging "The Bad Boys of Ballard" have included firecrackers, underwater noises that mimic killer whales, barrier nets, rubber arrows and spiked, foul-tasting food.)

Regulatory Struggle

Among its activities, FAMB has logged daily fishermen/mammal interactions in and near Monterey Bay, including the loss of 2,000 salmon during a two-month period in 1995. They've also gathered 20,000 signatures on a petition that urges Congress to either 1) manage the uncontrolled growth of marine mammal populations; or 2) return management of marine mammals to the states.

Even if FAMB reaches its goal of 200,000 signatures, however, it faces an uphill fight. First, if states manage marine mammals, they still might be shackled by a host of federal regulations. Those would include the MMPA and Endangered Species Act, plus a host of overriding federal laws administered by agencies like the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service. In short, the states might inherit a costly administrative headache, with little control over sea lions.

Second, NMFS doesn't support the idea of killing the mammals or limiting their growth - not yet, anyway. The environmental community isn't hot on the idea, either. Still, the feds came close in one case last year, when NMFS okayed the humane execution of several marauding sea lions at the Ballard Ship Locks. A Florida amusement park stepped in, however, and agreed to house the pesky pinnipeds, thus avoiding the first mammal execution in the MMPA's 24-year history. ("Unfortunately," FAMB's Colwell notes, "there aren't enough zoos in the world to handle the overabundance of California sea lions roaming the Pacific Coast.")

"We can't change federal policy until the animals exceed their Optimum Sustainable Population (OSP), and we won't know what that is until growth rate declines or crashes, since there's no good record of historic populations," cautions Jim Lecky, head of NMFS's Protected Species Division, Southwest Region. "They may just be re-settling in territory they once occupied." Currently, he notes, sea lions and harbour seal herds are growing at rates of 8% per year and 4% per year, respectively.

The problem in Monterey Bay, Lecky says, is that although sea lions typically migrate to Southern California's Channel Islands to breed in early summer, not all the animals - especially small ones - make the trip. When added to the returning mobs that fan out along the coast all the way to British Columbia in late summer and fall, it makes for a long season of fishermen/mammal interactions in the Bay.

Countering Lecky, FAMB says sea lions have reached their carrying capacity in several locales, and will simply keep branching out until they saturate the entire Pacific Coast, destroying any coastal fish runs in their path. In 1992, the group notes, 500 sea lion pups - nearly half of the pinniped crowd that gathers in Monterey annually - starved near the port's Coast Guard pier. Last July, dozens more starving sea lions washed up on Monterey beaches. To the north, in Marin County, volunteers spent countless hours and $10,000 per month in 1992, nursing malnourished sea lions back to health with meals of herring and cream. Same story in Santa Barbara and Ventura, where coastal rehab networks care for sick pinnipeds, many of which suffer from leptosporosis, a disease spread through contact with urine in crowded rookeries.

Even Theresa Friend, marine mammal coordinator for Moss Landing Marine Laboratories told reporters last July that a score of dead sea lions found on Del Monte Beach in Monterey may have been part of a herd that "overshot its carrying capacity."

Still, says Lecky, if overall numbers keep rising, the sea lions are short of OSP.

Despite philosophical differences, environmental groups appear willing to address the sea lion problem. "We need to pow-wow with fishermen about this," insists Sally Smith, communications director for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, near San Francisco. "We sympathise with fishermen and realise they have to make a living, but scapegoating sea lions and culling their herds is not the answer. Stream degradation, dams and logging have harmed salmon runs more than sea lions, which have been around for hundreds of years, through times when salmon runs were at their historic peak."

Adds NMFS's Lecky: "Sea lions aren't responsible for habitat degradation any more than they're responsible for oceanographic conditions that affect spawning, recruitment and survivability. Many species - including some salmon and steelhead runs - were in dire straits before sea lion populations began rising."

Some frustrated fishermen - sport and commercial alike - have taken matters into their own hands, evidence the fact that 10% of all animals treated last year at the Marine Mammal Center suffered from gunshot wounds. Shooting sea lions is a scary violation of federal law that carries a $20,000 fine and a year in jail. Still, only a deaf person could ignore the crack of rifle fire or the pop of a shotgun blasts that punctuate most days on California's salmon grounds.

And where is enforcement? It's stretched pretty thin, between a handful of NMFS agents patrolling a wide swath of the California coast, monitoring everything from illegal trade in endangered species to a host of mundane fishing regulations. Furthermore, it's difficult to catch fishermen in the act of shooting marine mammals and, in the words of one NMFS officer, "dead sea lions don't talk." Since 1995, NMFS has processed only two sea lion shooting cases.

Shoreside, fishermen have installed nail-impregnated boards along the rails of their boats to discourage sea lions from boarding. Federal officials have warned fishermen that if an animal gets hurt (disemboweled, say, while clambering aboard a boat) the fishermen will be held responsible. Fishermen have also taken heat from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which filed a formal objection to the nail-board practice. Legally, however, there remains confusion about how a fisherman may rig his boat, whether for fishing or protection against pests. Fishermen say it's not harassment, and therefore not a violation of the MMPA. To date, nobody's been busted for nail boards and no mammals have been hurt.

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