Fisherman V4
Rosalie Checca
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One late night five years ago, fisherman Giuseppe Pennisi was lying in bed with his laptop propped up on his barrel chest, reviewing video footage captured from his 76-foot boat, the Pioneer. The boat is a bottom trawler. It scoops up fish with a net that bounces across the seafloor at depths of more than 4,000 feet. A tinkerer, Pennisi likes to keep GoPro cameras attached to the net, allowing him to study the footage and improve his technique. That night, around 2 a.m., he noticed his camera slide past something unusual.
Along the murky seafloor, fish and rocks come in rounded shapes and soft colors, muted grays and greens. His eyes were attuned to this drab underwater landscape, which is why he had been puzzled by brief flashes of light on the video screen, shiny surfaces glimmering by. Then he saw it: a rectangular object, sharp-edged and pale, almost white, with a tinge of yellow.
He rewound the video, peered forward and froze the frame with the yellow rectangular object. It looked for all the world like a gold bar, an ingot. For a few minutes, he stared at it while his wife, Grazia, slept beside him.
The GoPro had captured hours of video on its memory card, in 12 clips lasting 18 minutes each. Over the next few days, Joe watched the video over and over, first on his laptop and then on a large television screen. All in all, he ended up counting more than 50 glints of yellow, and of those, about 30 seemed to have rectangular shapes and straight edges consistent with the contours of gold ingots. They were spread across a quarter mile within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. A vast swath of federally protected water off the California coast, the sanctuary covers 6,094 square miles, stretching from Marin County south to San Luis Obispo County and extending 30 miles offshore, on average. Joe plies his trade there along with thousands of amateur and professional fishers, pulling his net back and forth across the bottom of the Pacific.
The shiny objects were in very deep water, more than 1,000 feet down. Having done some diving in the course of his career, he knew that was well beyond the reach of typical diving gear. Probably only professional divers with special equipment or robotic vehicles could access that depth.
The boat that day was about 24 miles west of Half Moon Bay, in the open Pacific. In front of him, through the large wraparound windows of the wheelhouse, all he could see were tall blue waves and gulls and nothing else. Taped to one of the windows was a small photo of his late father, beneath a printed verse from Corinthians:
It was the first leg of a 48-hour fishing trip. Depending on the weather and the seasons, Joe typically makes this journey every other week, spending several days preparing the boat, then sailing Thursday morning and returning to shore late Saturday, at which point he and his crew stay up all night unloading tens of thousands of pounds of fish. Start to finish, the process takes 8 days. During that period, Joe runs on four hours of daily sleep.
Overnight, here in the Pacific, while everyone else on the boat was asleep, Joe had piloted the Pioneer to his favorite fishing grounds off the San Mateo coast. Now he was waiting for the right moment to lower the net, staring at a large screen connected to a sonar machine that pinpoints schools of fish underwater.
As the sun climbed that morning, solid bands of color started to form and twitch around on the screen, indicating that the fish had clustered near the ocean floor, like junior high kids finding their homeroom before the first bell. Joe got on the loudspeaker and told the crew it was time.
Using the winch, Joleen and the deckhand raised the open end of the net above the boat and released the fish onto the deck like a truck pouring cement. Once the pouring stopped, the fish kept moving, flapping in a pitiful break dance. Their bodies twisted from the change in pressure, which caused the eyes of the pink rockfish to bulge out of their sockets and their necks to distend, revealing tender blood-red gills that gasped for breath.
One of eight siblings in a crowded three-bedroom house with busted plumbing, Joe started to learn about trawling when he was just 7, when his father and grandfather brought him on fishing voyages aboard their boat, the San Giovanni I. As a young boy, Joe developed a fear of the ocean that would stay with him through adulthood. He saw how the net could get stuck and jar the boat backward, how cables and weights that rattled loose could easily knock him into the sea. He and his brother always had to wear balsa-stuffed life jackets, which doubled as pillows on overnight fishing trips.
Although Grazia spent the first week vomiting from seasickness, she found Joe charming. He used his tinkering abilities to impress her. One day he fashioned a bathtub out of some wood and a tarp and filled it with water from a deck hose.
He was trying to make the best of it, already adapting his methods to suit the new era of scarcity and regulation. Researchers and environmental groups have shown that trawling can harm delicate ocean ecosystems, disturbing the habitats of fish and other creatures on the bottom of the ocean. Joe partnered with an environmental organization to alter his fishing gear, lightening the net so that it hovered a few inches above the seafloor rather than scraping along its surface. A study by California State University Monterey Bay showed his design to be a dramatic improvement, reducing damage of the ocean floor; conservation groups praised it as a model.
Joe still gets excited when he talks about seeing the first videos captured by the Fisheye: endless images of fish and rocks and shale. Most anyone else would find the videos intolerably dull. Joe was transfixed and spent hundreds of hours watching the clips at home and while trawling.
His obsession was hard for his loved ones to understand, but to him it made perfect sense. He had spent his whole life fishing blind, never seeing his huge net do its work. Now, for the first time, he could observe his most important piece of equipment and the cold, dark water through which it moved. A mysterious realm, suddenly illuminated. And then, one night, he saw something that he never expected to see. He saw a flash of gold.
The galleons full of gold tended to float through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, not the Pacific Ocean, but for 2 centuries, from 1565 to 1815, another set of galleons worked a trade route that depended on California waters. These ships sailed west from Mexico carrying silver and gold coins, docking in Manila and exchanging the treasure for silk, porcelain, beeswax and intricate gold jewelry. The galleons then returned to the Americas, following trade winds to Northern California and making a right turn when they spotted Point Reyes, sailing south, back to Mexico.
For a fisherman like Joe to retrieve sunken treasure on his own would be rare, if not impossible. But trawlers are often the first to discover lost shipwrecks, for a simple reason: Their nets get snagged on wreckage.
Decades ago, for instance, trawler David Canepa was fishing off Monterey when his net was caught on a large underwater object. When he brought up the net, a strange chunk of corroded aluminum came up, too. It was from the Macon, a Navy zeppelin that crashed into the Pacific in 1935, killing two crewmen. Canepa marked the spot on his charts and years later tipped off the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which surveyed and mapped the wreck in 1990 and 1991.
Joe was becoming more certain that he had found something momentous, some forgotten yet epic part of maritime history. But he had no idea what to do next. Part of him was afraid to talk about his discovery, fearing someone else might get to it first. Another part of him wanted to blurt out the news to everyone at the wharf.
He soon succumbed to the urge. With his phone, he took a photo of the screen and started texting the snapshot to his fishing buddies. The image showed olive-green water with orange fish swimming past a rectangular object giving off a golden glow.
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