![]() (Photo by Sean Kasmir)ĬAN’T KEEP UP WITH THE DEMAND!” Lombard shouts from the water’s edge. Kirk Lombard poke poles off the coast of San Francisco. And the monkeyface is beautiful on the inside, or, at least, it is delicious, which to someone like Lombard is sort of the same thing. Lombard says the fish’s face has a “simian quality” to it, due in part to the placement of its eyes, which rather than looking out from the side of its head like a fish’s, stare morosely from the center of its face.īut there is superficial beauty, and there is beauty on the inside. ” In a 2004 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, food writer Peggy Knickerbocker called them “ugly as sin.” The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s website describes the monkeyface as having “a bluntly rounded snout, large fleshy lips, and … a lumpy ridge. The wolf eel that lives off of California’s shores isn’t an eel either: like the monkeyface, it belongs to Perciformes, the largest order of modern bony fishes.īesides being a poser, the monkeyface is also widely known for having a face that could incite a thousand ships to retreat to harbor. This sort of misnomer is pretty common, Catania says. One thing the monkeyface is concealing is that it isn’t a true eel.Īccording to Dave Catania, the senior ichthyology collections manager for the California Academy of Sciences, the monkeyface, though long and slender, does not fall into the true eels order, Anguilliformes. They have named it Monty Sanctuary spokeswoman Mary Jane Schramm says Monty has a “low-key” personality, a “quiet” charisma and a frequent “habit of concealment.” The Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association has a monkeyface on display at its visitor center. In adulthood (they can live up to 18 years) they dine on algae, but occasionally “lower their standards and accept a piece of squid offered to them at the end of a bamboo pole,” Lombard says. The monkeyface may not change location, but it sure can change its diet: as juveniles, monkeyfaces are crustacean-eating carnivores, but they become herbivores once they reach a few inches in length. In fact, the monkeyface is so disinclined toward movement that it evolved accessory breathing organs that serve as lungs so that it can stay put while the tide has gone out, breathing air for up to 35 hours at a time. Monkeyface eels ( Cebidtichthys violaceus) range from Oregon to Baja California, but an individual monkeyface doesn’t wander farther than 15 feet from its preferred rock crevice in the intertidal zone. He monkeyface eel lives its life like it’s keeping a secret. Kirk Lombard prepares to fish the San Francisco shoreline using his poke pole. Lombard acknowledges that the details of his encounter with Cambodian Stan have faded some in the last two decades, which may explain why the tale is slightly different in each media re-telling.īut no matter the details of the encounter, there is always one nugget at the heart of the story: the monkeyface eel. He has posted a 5-minute musical ode to Cambodian Stan on YouTube. His infrequently used blog,, is a collection of fishing tidbits, self-promotion, and unusual musings on the state of the world. He is distractible, and in his unbridled enthusiasm sometimes interrupts his own outlandish anecdotes. He’s an athletic man, whose signature black-framed glasses have appeared on numerous magazine and newspaper covers. Lombard, a former wildlife inspector for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who now runs a commercial fishing business and leads undeniably strange coastal walking tours, is by nature a dramatic character. He never saw his muse again, but over the next 18 years Lombard would achieve semi-fame as the “Sea Forager,” known to restaurants and the press as the poke-poling hunter of the monkeyface eel. The next day Lombard found a patch of bamboo growing near the San Francisco airport and chopped down a few poles. Shortly afterward Stan pulled out a cabezon – a large-headed sculpin – and that, Lombard says, is the moment he decided to abandon his rod and reel. Stan showed Lombard the metal hook at the end of the bamboo pole where he had skewered his bait, and plunged it into a water-filled cavity at the base of Squack Rock. “This” - he gestured at the 4-foot-long bamboo pole and out to the rocks below his feet - “is called poke poling.” Intrigued, he climbed down from Squack Rock to ask the man who he was and what he was up to. The man slid the stick between the cracks of the rocks, somehow hooking half a dozen fish in a matter of minutes. N an overcast afternoon in the fall of 1996, while casting his line from “Squack Rock,” a not-so-affectionately named craggy outcrop near Pescadero, Kirk Lombard paused to watch a skinny, middle-aged man in a beat-up wetsuit hop around the rocks with a bamboo stick.
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