National spearfishing championship lures hopeful anglers from across U.S.

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Al Schneppershoff counts and measures fish.

Malibu father and daughter take first in mixed team division.

By Patrick Timothy Mullikin / Special to The Malibu Times

The line of soggy burlap sacks snaked its way from shoreline to a makeshift weigh station late Thursday afternoon.

Tied and tagged, each bag contained a briny assortment of California sheepshead, opal-eye perch, rubber-lip perch, calico bass, sand bass and other fish that were either too slow or not paying close enough attention to the stealthy spearfishers who invaded the reefs at Leo Carrillo State Beach last week.

Each of the bagged fish bore a distinctive puncture wound, and if the spearfisher’s aim was right on the mark, the wound was near the head.

Here, on dry land and out of their wetsuits, spearfishers and well-wishers swarmed the weigh station, craning their necks as the sacks were emptied into a cooler to be measured, then weighed, as a stone-faced fish and game warden stood by.

It’s a beauty contest of sorts, and the 60 or so spearfishers who have traveled across the United States and Hawaii to compete in the 2009 USA Spearfishing Championship gasped with envy at some of the entries. One California sheepshead, mouth agape and eyes open wide in a permanent expression of bewilderment, causes a stir. It might be the largest fish caught that day, and this is big news for these champions who are vying to represent the United States next year at the Pan-American and World Spearfishing Championships in Croatia.

“The one thing about fishing in a tournament is that it’s very black and white in who won,” said Dave Edlund, national skin diving director of the Underwater Society of America. “Some things in life are gray, but at the end of the day in a fishing tournament, with a certain set of rules, you know where you stand.”

Edlund said this is the fourth time in 59 years the championships have been in Malibu, and the day was going great.

“This is an awesome event,” said Ellen Reaser-Choi, who was helping out at the Greater Los Angeles Council of Divers’ booth. GLACD, along with The Los Angeles Fathomiers, cosponsored the event. Reaser-Choi said Thursday’s gathering was much larger than the last one held in Malibu 1997 and that it has also grown as a spectator sport. Not a spearfisher herself, she praised her fellow divers.

“If you are using a fishing pole, whatever bites on your hook, you pull it up and then decide whether it’s legal or not,” she said. “As far as preserving things, they are very selective as to what they’ll take and how much they take.”

While it may be an awesome event from the spectator’s point of view, it’s a grueling test of endurance for the competitors, Edlund said.

During the daylong competition divers spend about six hours in the water. “These are the best breath-hold divers in the United States. Spearfishing requires a lot of physical stamina,” Edlund said. Spearfishers must be able to hold their breath underwater for several minutes (some can do it up as long as five), sneak up on fish and spear them successfully.

No easy task, he said.

Nineteen-year-old Malibu resident Amanda Ernst knows this firsthand. She was one of a handful of women spearfishers (Edlund estimates women make up about 5 percent of the sport) and competed in Thursday’s event with her father, Bill Ernst, whose pelagic pedigree began in 1962 and includes spearing a record-breaking 93.4-pound white sea bass in 2007.

Amanda said her day began with a bout of mal de mer as she and her father paddled their kayaks through cold and choppy water to a spot north of the event’s staging area.

“It’s in my blood,” she said of diving and spearfishing. Being on a mixed team with her father, she said, is a bonding experience. “It’s father/daughter time,” she added with a laugh.

Laughter aside, she and her father placed first in the mixed team division. Amanda also won the “Women’s Largest Fish” in the Women’s Division Individual High Aggregate score for her catch of a Sheepshead at 6.56 pounds.

“For an August day it was freezing cold,” Bill said of the day’s beginning. “It was about 57 degrees, which is like wintertime water. But we ended up shooting enough fish where we beat all the other mixed teams.”

Friday night the spearfishers met at Duke’s Malibu for their awards banquet. This night it was high heels and flip-flops, cocktail dresses and cutoffs as the spearfishers browsed through a big photo album of 58 years of similar gatherings. Some were looking longingly at the coveted Owen Churchill (inventor of the rubber swim fin) Trophy. The silver-plated trophy, the Heinzman of spearfishing, stays locked up in a vault between banquets; the original sterling silver trophy was stolen a few years back.

As the evening progresses, spearfisher talk turned to the Marine Life Protection Act and its effect on their sport.

Bill Ernst, who has been spearfishing for 45 years and has participated in tournaments throughout the world talks of a gathering in Iquique, Chile, in the early seventies.

“We shot so many fish-just bags and bags and bags of fish,” he recalled. “We had it [the tournament] at the same place 20 years later, and it was like a ghost town. It was unbelievable. And the same way here from when I was diving in the ’60s here on the coast. Something has to be done.”

Edlund agreed with Ernst that something needs to be done, but not at the expense of the sport.

“Frankly what it boils down to is what the right percentage of marine protected area is. No one really knows,” Edlund said. “We’re pro-fishing. We believe you should allow the maximum amount of fishing without damaging the resources.”

Spearfishers, he said, have worked with the scientific community for the past 50 years by providing data on speared fish.

“It’s not like we just shoot fish and throw them in the garbage can. We don’t waste the fish that we do harvest,” he said.

Indeed not.

The hundred of pounds of fish the spearfishers harvested during Thursday’s competition were donated to the Ventura County Rescue Mission to help feed the hungry and homeless.

For more about the 2009 U.S. National Spearfishing Championships and a complete the list of winners, visit www.nationals09.com.