SOMA MORNING SKY FLEET CLOSERS PROFESSIONAL

Joe plies his trade there along with thousands of amateur and professional fishers, pulling his net back and forth across the bottom of the Pacific. A vast swath of federally protected water off the California coast, the sanctuary covers 6,094 square miles, stretching from Marin County south to San Luis Obispo County and extending 30 miles offshore, on average. They were spread across a quarter mile within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. All in all, he ended up counting more than 50 glints of yellow, and of those, about 30 seemed to have rectangular shapes and straight edges consistent with the contours of gold ingots. Over the next few days, Joe watched the video over and over, first on his laptop and then on a large television screen. The GoPro had captured hours of video on its memory card, in 12 clips lasting 18 minutes each. That’s when he really started to freak out, because the rectangular object - whatever it might be - wasn’t the only one. In his bed in Castroville, he went back to the beginning of the video and looked for the flashes he had noticed earlier. Joe tried to imagine what it would feel like to hold a gold bar. “How do you know what it is?” she asked, then rolled over. She squinted at the yellow rectangular object. “I gotta get the kids up for school,” Grazia said, stirring on her side of the bed. Grazia handled most of the kid duties because Joe spent so much time working, and unlike her husband, who had become semi-nocturnal after years of fishing through the night, she maintained a normal schedule. But the house felt cramped, with only three bedrooms for eight people. He liked living in Castroville because his backyard was spacious enough to accommodate old trawling gear and a rusty crane for construction projects. At the time, he kept his boat at the Moss Landing harbor 10 minutes away later he would shift the boat to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Joe, Grazia and their six children shared a beige stucco house in Castroville, north of Monterey. For a few minutes, he stared at it while his wife, Grazia, slept beside him. It looked for all the world like a gold bar, an ingot. He rewound the video, peered forward and froze the frame with the yellow rectangular object.

SOMA MORNING SKY FLEET CLOSERS FREE

This story is also available as an audiobook - free for paid subscribers - that you can purchase here. Thanks for signing up for the Chronicle’s coverage. His net often got caught on the rotting underwater husks of old ships wrecked just beyond the Golden Gate, and he knew that some of those ships - Spanish galleons, Gold Rush-era steamers - had carried treasure. Still, Joe sensed immediately what it might be. He had never seen anything like the object in the video. He had sailed on commercial boats since he was 7 his father and grandfather had towed their nets in the same waters for more than a century. It was September 2014, and Pennisi, who goes by Joe, was 50 years old, with four decades of fishing behind him. Then he saw it: a rectangular object, sharp-edged and pale, almost white, with a tinge of yellow. His eyes were attuned to this drab underwater landscape, which is why he had been puzzled by brief flashes of light on the video screen, shiny surfaces glimmering by. That night, around 2 a.m., he noticed his camera slide past something unusual.Īlong the murky seafloor, fish and rocks come in rounded shapes and soft colors, muted grays and greens. A tinkerer, Pennisi likes to keep GoPro cameras attached to the net, allowing him to study the footage and improve his technique. It scoops up fish with a net that bounces across the seafloor at depths of more than 4,000 feet. One late night five years ago, fisherman Giuseppe Pennisi was lying in bed with his laptop propped up on his barrel chest, reviewing video footage captured from his 76-foot boat, the Pioneer.

Soma morning sky fleet closers