Hooked on a Lifestyle : Fishing, Cards and Camaraderie Are Lures Retiree Can’t Resist

He clocks in punctually each day a bit before noon, bearing the tools of his trade. A fishing pole is in one hand, an old scuffed tackle box in the other. He sports a plaid flannel shirt, baggy blue jeans and a dirt-smudged, canvas hat with a thin twine of dock rope stitched to the brim and gold portholes on the sides.

Gene Peach has arrived. As he does four or five days a week, the 75-year-old retiree steps aboard the charter fishing boat Western Pride, docked at Davey’s Locker on the Balboa Peninsula, and prepares for an afternoon on the water.

Time to go after some bonito, a barracuda or two, or a few calico bass. During the jaunt in and out to the fishing spots, Peach and his buddies will also deal a few dozen rounds of seven-card stud, nickel a hand, and high spade in the hole splits the pot.

These are the common sights of summer, the fishing charters heading out of Newport Harbor loaded with a cargo of tourists and locals armed with fishing rods and hopes of snagging that behemoth we all know lurks beneath the choppy swells. But none is more regular than Peach and his gang, an avuncular contingent of fishermen who know the waters off Orange County like they know their grandkids. Maybe better.

Peach has been doing this for about a decade, heading out on the Western Pride every weekday, skipping the weekends when too many teen-agers and landlubbers clog the boat’s wooden rails. His post-retirement stint aboard the charter boat represents just a fraction of his fishing career. Peach has been angling the local waters since he was 10.

He looks the part of the old man and the sea. Deep lines crease his face, a bushy white mustache rests below wire-rimmed glasses. His hands are thick and stubby, callused from the years.

By the time the Western Pride’s engines roared to life and the boat swung away from the dock, Peach and his cohorts were huddled around one of the booths in the cafeteria below deck, playing poker.

As the Western Pride lunged across the waves, the cards were dealt hard and fast. Nickels and quarters flew. And the table listed decidedly toward Claude Wright, a gregarious retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy affectionately known as “the Sheriff” while aboard the Western Pride. Wright was winning most of the nickels this day.

“It’ll change. It’ll change,” Peach muttered, peering at his fan of cards from a corner of the booth.

Nearby, Jeanne Harris settled into a booth to watch the game and offer up some homemade brownies she had brought aboard for the men.

“They’re all characters, but really nice guys,” said Harris, a Corona del Mar resident who spends one afternoon a week fishing on the Western Pride with her husband John. “None of them are foul-mouthed or anything.”

But they are competitive when it comes to fishing. Harris recalled how it stuck in the craw of Peach and the rest when she returned from a trip off Key West, Fla., having reeled in a record 46-pound fish.

“Of course they didn’t talk to me for a while after that,” she said, “But they got over it.”

Peach kept getting lousy cards, so he turned his attention to talking fishing. He’s done it all--the ocean, lakes, streams--and remembers the way it was in the old days, “before everything was fished out.”

A week earlier he returned from a trout fishing trip among the lakes flanking Mt. Shasta. But he much prefers the ocean to fly fishing in some mountain brook. “It’s close and convenient,” Peach said. “I live in Huntington Beach, only about 10 miles up the coast from here. Anyway, I’m too old for that mountain stuff. It’s too cold.”

Suddenly, the boat slowed. Peach and his buddies jumped up from the table. “Here we are!” Peach said, scurrying up the ladder and out the hatch like a man several springs younger. There were fish to be caught.

Left in their wake to clean the table of discarded beer cans was Fran Maxwell, the boat’s fry chef. “The regulars like Gene, I just really love them,” she said. “They’re all like grandfathers to me. The old stories they tell you, of how it was 25, 35 years ago. All the construction, it scares them. They feel like they’re being pushed away.”

The boat motored slowly, trolling for just the right spot. Capt. Bob Ezell scanned an electronic fish-finding scope, hunting for the bright red blob that would indicate a school directly below. At the stern, deckhand Mike Hennessy chucked handfuls of live anchovies he pulled with a small net from a big storage tank.

Then someone spotted a fish flop off in the distance. “They’re jumping back there!”

“They’re boiling, Mike,” someone else yelled.

The deck was abuzz with activity. Captain Bob swung the boat around, while Peach and the rest grabbed their poles and began casting off in all directions.

Jim Orstad, 68, stood just off Peach’s right elbow, and within a minute he pulled a hefty bonito from the sea. A few minutes later, Orstad pulled up another fish, its silver and turquoise sides gleaming in the sunlight. A smile lighted Orstad’s face.

Peach, meanwhile, was being shut out. He shook his head and muttered something. This, obviously, was getting hard to take. But within 10 minutes, no one was catching fish, not even Orstad.

“OK boys and girls, time to go,” Ezell announced over the boat’s public address system. “The fish took off and left us. That’s the way it’s been all day.”

As Peach reeled in his line and the boat set off for new waters, the Sheriff scampered over to console him. Friends could see Peach was mildly irked that the fish were avoiding his hook.

Several times a week, Peach wins the fishing derby held each day aboard the Western Pride (the boat’s scrapbook has a picture of him holding two salmon, one of them a 25-pound whopper he caught off Orange County in April). Each participant pays $3 to enter the contest, and the angler who catches the biggest fish takes the pot. Today nearly $70 was at stake, and Peach was off to a bad start.

“He’s got a reputation as the man with the most jackpots,” said the Sheriff.

“Yeah, you can see how good I’m doing today,” Peach muttered.

The Sheriff ignored this. “They call him Gene the fishing machine,” he said with a grin. “Jackpot Gene.”

Even Peach, a no-nonsense guy who normally wears a poker face, smiled.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to the fish,” he said. “There’s a little skill to it, but not particularly this type of fishing. This is just finding schools of fish and having them hit your hook.”

Peach didn’t always spend afternoons fishing. For 45 years he was a truck driver, running loads of gasoline, diesel and propane from refineries. He never had an accident.

Last Dec. 26, he and wife Eileen celebrated their 50th year of marriage. After all the years, she still approves of his afternoons on the water. “She knows I’m not chasing around somewhere, not sitting in a bar . . . ,” Peach says. “The secret of marriage, I think, is the longer you’re away from one another the better.”

After a few more attempts to find a flock of fish in deep water, Capt. Bob gave up and headed toward shore. The crew set anchor south of Crystal Cove just a few hundred yards offshore, and the fishermen cast from the stern. They should have good luck with calico bass in this spot, the captain explained over the loudspeaker.

Jeff Patrick, relief captain and deckhand, teased Peach by nudging his rod from behind, simulating a fish nibbling on the other end. Peach didn’t even turn, just muttered, “Keep it up and I’ll throw you in the water.”

Your luck will change, Gene. It’ll change.

Indeed, on his first cast Peach reeled in a fat little calico. “Yeah, he caught a fish, he caught a fish,” chanted Patrick, seizing the opportunity to josh the old fisherman.

Pulling out the hook with a pair of pliers, Peach tossed the fish back in the water. It was not a keeper.

“Most of them I don’t throw back I give away,” he said. “I give them to people on the boat, people who don’t catch any fish. I eat bass maybe one day a week, that’s it.”

For the next half hour, Peach pulled in fish on nearly every cast. His luck continued on the trip back to port. The cards turned friendly, and he took hand after hand in poker.

What lures Peach to this boat and this stretch of ocean are the people, the camaraderie, the feel of a fish hitting his line like a lightning bolt under the waves.

“It’s the companionship, the poker game, not getting bored riding in and out,” he allows. “And it’s just the thrill of hooking a fish. It’s just still a thrill to me.”