Dressed in grey overalls and a knitted cap, Nathaniel James, 40, sat in the passenger seat of his Toyota minivan along Berkeley’s south seawall with the door open, a seven-foot fishing pole in hand. Since arriving there at 4:30 a.m. with a Denny’s breakfast and a cup of coffee, James had barely moved, attuned to the delicate reverberations that might indicate that a striped bass was nibbling the anchovy at the end of his fishing line, cast some 20 yards into the San Francisco Bay.
A passerby stopped to ask the usual question: “Catch anything?”
“I caught a big old sting ray and I threw it back. They got good stripers here,” James responded, using the shortened form for striped bass, “and lots of perch.” It was August, so California halibut was also running, a prized fish that costs $28-$29 a pound at Safeway, but so far James hadn’t snagged any of those…