THE OUTDOORS : Outdoor Notes / Pete Thomas : It Isn’t Jaws, but Diving Near Catalina Isn’t Routine Either

On an average day, especially during the warm summer months, the ocean surrounding Catalina Island is a favorite area of Southland divers.

The proximity and clear water make for a place where the average diver can explore a variety of sea life in relative safety.

Try to convince Tom Blandford of that.

The Carson resident is an experienced free-diver--free-divers do not use scuba gear--and a regular visitor to Catalina, but Sunday he had reason to exercise more caution than he previously had.

Hoping to find such game fish as yellowtail and white sea bass, Blandford and Tony Mitchell slipped off their boat at Eagle Reef, an area just west of the Isthmus, and noticed that the conditions were unusual.

“The visibility was only about 15 feet,” Blandford recalled.

Then, as if from nowhere, a huge shark appeared.

“It was a (great) white shark, about 15 feet long,” Blandford said. “It wasn’t aggressive, I watched it and thought it would swim away. But then it turned and was swimming straight toward me. It was so big you could have played Ping-Pong on its back.”

Blandford aimed his high-powered spear gun and pulled the trigger. The spear penetrated the shark’s head and remained there, Blandford said.

“I’m used to fish reacting (after shooting them), but it just sat there, motionless, about 11 feet away,” he said. “It just stared at us for about 5 seconds, then it started moving slowly.”

Mitchell, new to the free-diving scene, was nervous. “What do we do now?” he asked Blandford.

The pair swam back to the boat and Blandford, with the line attached to the spear spooling away in the opposite direction, quickly started his motor.

He followed the fish--he estimated its weight at 2,000 pounds--to Emerald Cove, about 1 1/2 miles west of the Isthmus. By then it had taken all 500 feet of his gun’s 400-pound-test monofilament.

He attached a buoy to the line and tossed it overboard. Finally, the shark surfaced just inches away from the boat and shook its head, dislodging the spear. It then sounded and swam out of sight.

Blandford, who loves to dive, said he’ll be back in the water before long. “But I’m going to alter my habits a bit,” he said. “From now on I’m going to stay out of dirty water and I’m going out this week to get a shark blaster (a spear tip loaded with buckshot).”

Dennis Bedford, a biologist with the Department of Fish and Game, said that great whites are sometimes caught by commercial fishing boats near Catalina, but usually on the other side of the island from where Blandford and Mitchell were diving.

In 1984, Blandford and Harry Ingram were diving off Mexico’s Guadalupe Island when a great white shark charged the pair, shoving Ingram’s gun butt into his shoulder, then tossing Ingram over the shark’s back.

Blandford is hoping that there will be no third experience with great whites.

Jack Sampson of Santa Fe, N.M., a former editor of Field & Stream magazine, may soon be a world record-holder, thanks to the 31-pound 12-ounce roosterfish he caught on a fly rod off Costa Rica’s Bat Islands.

Information on Sampson’s catch, including the fly line and fly, has been submitted to the International Game Fish Assn. for approval.

The current fly rod record is a 25-pound 8-ounce roosterfish caught in 1974 off the Baja California coast.

For the second consecutive year, the DFG is stocking roadside streams in Inyo County with catchable-size, hatchery-raised eastern brook trout.

Eight streams, all located west of U.S. 395 between Big Pine and Lone Pine, will be involved the project aimed at providing diversified angler opportunities in the Eastern Sierra. About 13,000 fish will have been stocked when trout season ends next month.

Included in the program are Baker Creek, Big Pine Creek, Goodale Creek, Independence Creek, Lone Pine Creek, Taboose Creek, Tinemaha Creek and Tuttle Creek.

Briefly

For trout plant information, updated each Monday by the DFG, call (213) 590-5020. . . . Instruction for all skill levels in the Orvis “Instinctive Shooting Method” will be given Sept. 29-30 at Raahauge’s shooting grounds in Norco. For details call (800) 367-2299.

Attention target shooters: The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Forest Service announced that effective Friday, recreational shooting within a half mile of California 33 in Ventura County near Ojai, between Tule Creek and Portero John Creek, will be prohibited because of “excessive littering and vandalism to government property, and because public safety is being threatened by careless and irresponsible shooters.”

Los Padres National Forest has issued a Stage II fire alert and has closed Piru Creek to public entry. . . . Jim Edmondson, regional manager of California Trout, will present a slide show entitled, “Confessions of a Trout Conservationist” at the San Gabriel Valley Flyfishers’ meeting Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m. at the Legg Lake-Whittier Narrows Visitors’ Center in El Monte.