Recreational fishing in the Bay Area seems about as popular as it’s ever been. Many fishing grounds we once enjoyed alone are now overrun by weekend crowds and fleets of skiffs. Traffic jams clog boat ramps, and pier anglers must jockey for elbow room when the herring, halibut and sturgeon are running.
One might guess this is the best of times for bait and tackle shops, but it’s not. Around the Bay Area, they have shuttered their shops as anglers increasingly buy their hardware through online orders.
But in south San Rafael, on the floating docks of Loch Lomond Marina, there is one notable exception.
“We don’t want to hear any excuses, you hear?” barked a gruff voice as a young man walked out the door and up the ramp with a bucket of live anchovies and several halibut rigs.
It’s one of many repeat jokes of the affable Keith Fraser, who has owned and operated Loch Lomond Live Bait, day in and day out, for exactly 50 years. Run mostly by Fraser, whose business phone is also his cell, the shop essentially never closes.
“He’s here basically 365 days a year,” said Brian Porterfield, a Santa Rosa resident who has helped run Loch Lomond Live Bait for the past several years. “If it’s Christmas and you call and you’re going fishing, he’ll get you your bait.”
Fraser, now 85, is tall, with angular features, the lean and lanky build of an athlete, and the hammy humor of a tireless radio personality.
“If you don’t catch any fish, we’ll have you arrested!” he called after another customer, leaving the shop with a dozen pile worms.
Fraser was born in San Francisco. He grew up in Marin, excelled as baseball pitcher through high school and into college. He attended the College of Marin and UC Berkeley, bagging degrees in physical education and journalism. In the early 1970s, he was coaching baseball and teaching both these subjects to high schoolers in Santa Rosa when he found an opportunity to buy a small San Rafael bait shop.
He and a friend, Art Donati, pooled together $6,700 and on Oct. 18, 1972 made the transaction. At the time, the shop was stationed a few docks away within the same marina. Fraser recalls how a neighboring marina resident predicted a fast flip on the business. “He said we wouldn’t last three months,” Fraser recalled.
Five decades later, more than two dozen framed big fish photos on the inside walls of the shop trace the history of the business. Anglers in dated garb from the 1970s and 80s display huge striped bass and halibut and plenty of giant sturgeon. Fraser as a young man appears in several of the photos, usually a modest bystander in others’ moments of triumph.
His wife of three decades, Gloria, is also shown hoisting a few fish, as is the decorated outdoors writer Tom Stienstra. One man stands on the dock beside a dead and dangling green sturgeon, today a threatened species that anglers cannot remove from the water. Recurring faces are seen in the images, reminding viewers that sport fishing success is just a fleeting, if often lethal, thrill.
A handful of photos feature local kids that Fraser took under his wing, inviting them to help run the shop’s live bait service and often motoring them onto the Bay for some fishing. One of those boys was named Todd Fisher. He lives in South Dakota now, but his childhood memory is stacked with memories of the bait shop and Fraser, then in his late 30s.
“He was like a second dad to me,” Fisher, now 57, recalled. Fisher would visit the shop with his parents, buy shrimp and fish off the dock for surfperch. Fraser eventually took Fisher out on his boat for larger quarry, and as a teenager Fisher helped run the store. Life lessons were learned, and Fisher credits Fraser with guiding him deeper into the watery expanses of the natural world as well as teaching him basics of running a business.
Fisher was hardly the only youngster that Fraser coached through impressionable years.
“If there’s a legacy of that man, it’s all the people he’s helped,” Fisher said.
Fraser is known among local fishers primarily as a reliable source of bait, tackle and to-the-hour updates on what’s biting and where, but Fraser is also an environmentalist who has promoted conservation almost since the shop’s beginning.
In 1978, he founded the United Anglers of California, now an advocacy and conservation group oriented in southern California. In 1983, the group staged a memorable opposition to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ practice of dumping dredging sludge, scoured from the Bay’s shipping channels, near Alcatraz Island.
Here, the sediment smothered rocky reefs and made fishing for sight-based species, like striped bass and halibut, all but impossible at times, and Fraser’s ragtag bait shop ensemble aimed to stop the dumping. They rallied up more than 150 boat operators, as he recalls it, and created a blockade that prevented a scheduled dump. The practice was ended some years later.
Though he prizes striped bass as his favorite fish to eat, Fraser talks less about the culinary side of fishing than the importance of letting fish go.
“It will make you feel good all over,” he said.
This line, and this ethos, is not a new talking point for him.
“In the 80s and 90s, almost everyone in the industry and all the boat captains were all about, ‘Take, take, take,’” said Western Outdoor News Northern California editor David Hurley, who has known Fraser since around the turn of this century. “’But Keith encouraged catch-and-release. In that sense, he was like a voice in the wilderness. He knew we were dealing with finite resources when others didn’t see it.”
In the interest of minimizing the damage to released fish, Fraser refuses to sell live bait rigs or lures with the standard triple-pronged hook dangling off the bottom.
“Those treble hooks kill way too many undersized halibut,” he recently told a customer, who was rifling through the pile of packaged bait rigs, looking for this particular innovation of fishing technology. “I stopped selling those years ago. You won’t find one in the shop.”
Perhaps his surest success in the realm of protecting resources has been his support of various existing restrictions on taking white sturgeon. Over the decades, the regulations have been steadily tightened on this species. One rule for which Fraser takes some credit is the 75-day annual ban on sturgeon fishing in the Central Bay during the herring spawning season, when the larger fish gather to feast on herring roe.
The live bait tanks attract birds, but where some in the business might chase them away, Fraser has made friends of egrets, gulls and herons. He’s even named them – things like Emma, Sneaky, Pee Wee, Ahab and Nasty. They frequent the dock, take anchovy handouts, squabble over treats, and sometimes tread into the shop and onto the counter.
“If I could teach them to use the phone, they could run the shop,” Fraser said.
Though Fraser has plans to hand the business off to a friend within a year, he swears he hasn’t grown tired of going to work, even if he does repeat his favorite jokes.
“If you don’t catch something today, we’ll have you thrown in jail!” he told another customer, leaving the store with the morning’s bait.
Fraser doesn’t quite grin or smile when he cracks these jokes, but his eyes sparkle.
“They love that one,” he said. “It never gets old.”
