All but two of the lakes are seasonally stocked with trout and catfish. The fish are a mix of nonnative and native species of California halibut, striped bass, jacksmelt, sharks, and rays along the salty shoreline, to rainbow trout, black bass, and catfish further inland. But today none of them seem to hail from my home country, so I head back to shore with plans to visit Lake Del Valle next week.ĭel Valle and Point Pinole are among the 11 lakes, two piers, and more than 25 miles of Bay and Delta shoreline designated for fishing in the East Bay Regional Park District, covering Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Park officials say roughly 30 visitors a day come here to fish.
The pier stretches 1,250 feet into the Bay and was built in 1977. I see parents and kids fishing from the Point Pinole pier, as they have for generations. She fried it, prepared a special sauce, and made sure everyone in the family tasted my epic achievement. The first fish I ever caught was a tiny tilapia from the stream, not much bigger than a child’s hand, but my mom made an elaborate production out of it.
On Sundays, we would head to my grandparents’ farm in the country, where we fished for trout and tilapia in the stream that ran through the orchards of mango, jackfruit, guava, and banana trees. The adults, for the most part, did their best to shield us kids from it, and fishing became an escape from the strife being on the water was a refuge from the bullets and bombs. I started fishing when I was a boy growing up in Vietnam during the height of the war. I’d eat too much, and then lie down and watch TV… It’s not healthy.”įishing in the Bay since the 1950s, Curtis Reichert casts from the pier in Point Pinole Regional Shoreline park, hoping to hook a striped bass. “It’s very quiet, very peaceful,” he says. He has been laid off from his construction job, so he rides his bike here a few times a week to pass the time. Wishing him well, I head down the pier to say hello to Jim Tumaneng, an immigrant from the Philippines looking for striped bass. More women are trying their hands at tackles and lures too, though fishing here remains a predominantly male pastime. Today, there are more Asians and Hispanics, and with them, the languages spoken at the pier have become more diverse: Spanish, Tagalog, Cambodian, Vietnamese. It used to be whites and African-Americans, many drawn by work in the nearby shipyards. Reichert talks about the usual anglers at Pinole and how over the years the demographics have changed. In the old days, we got stripers every day.” And, he remarks wistfully, “We used to have flounder out here…I think the commercial guys got them all.”Īnglers still go for salmon, striped bass, halibut, sturgeon, leopard shark, and surfperch at Point Pinole, says ranger Sushawn Robb, but “it’s not as good as it used to be. He’s reeled in striped bass that are more than 40 inches and sturgeon over seven feet, he says. But today, rather than finding my Vietnamese compatriots, I’ve found a man who really knows his fish. I emigrated from Vietnam to San Francisco when I was 12, and, like Reichert, I enjoy fishing. My aim is to learn about the Vietnamese fishing community that uses the East Bay parks, talk with a few anglers in our mother tongue, then chronicle their lives and their love of fishing. I strike up a conversation, telling him that I’m there on assignment for Bay Nature. While Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” spills out from his transistor radio, Reichert casts his lines into the Bay, hoping for striped bass. His one true love has always been fishing-an old man and the sea. I’ve been outside all of my life.” Reichert, now 70, grew up in nearby San Pablo, farmed a little bit, and worked construction too. “People say ‘I love to fish,’ but it’s just an excuse,” says Curtis Reichert. A faint aroma from the eucalyptus groves lingers in the air along the trails to the pier. Below, a few American coots loiter on the water. From the pier at Point Pinole Regional Shoreline, a dollop of parkland in Richmond on the eastern shore of San Pablo Bay, he can see Mount Tamalpais shimmering across the Bay. This afternoon, however, he has gone more than seven hours without taking a fish. The latter-day Ernest Hemingway-tall and rugged, long silver hair flowing from beneath an Oakland A’s cap, a beard, weathered skin-has been fishing in these waters since he was a boy in the 1950s.
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