The Bay Is His Baby, and He’s a Fierce Guardian

Rimm Fay rises with the fishes.

By dawn most mornings, he already has a couple of cups of coffee down his gullet as he shoves off in his 24-foot trawler, preparing for yet another exploratory dive beneath his beloved and beleaguered Santa Monica Bay.

For decades it has been this way: a sometimes stubborn, always idealistic marine biologist continuing his life of intimate contact with the sea. Four times a week, the 68-year-old Fay dons his scuba gear to wander the ocean floor off the Malibu coast, harvesting marine specimens for biomedical laboratories around the world.

Since the 1950s, his Pacific Bio-Marine Labs has sent lobsters to Australia, South Korea and Japan. He has sent horn sharks caught by hand to a Minnesota zoological park, starfish to Columbia and Harvard, and sea urchins to Santa Monica College so students could study their evolution.

His specimens have been used to study human nerve cell damage as well as to develop weapons against various tumors and to concoct a nonaddictive pain reliever stronger than morphine.

Fay, a Santa Monica native and former state coastal commissioner, knows the contributions his marine creatures are making to mankind. But he questions what favors man has done them and their ecosystem in return. Despite some signs in recent years of improvement in the health of the bay, he remains a prodding voice against what he sees as mistreatment of the waters.

“They’ve dumped everything in this bay except radioactive waste,” he complains.

To meet Rimmon Fay is to see a crusty old sailor whose ruddy skin and reddened eyes suggest someone who has logged too many sea miles under the sun. He’s a curious mix of scientist and gadfly, fisherman and no-nonsense environmentalist.

For years, he has carried his love for the California coast like Don Quixote’s lance and shield. To local fishermen, fellow biologists, developers and politicians, he’s an unapologetic guardian of the bay. Others see him as merely a crotchety dreamer and a fool, a man who exaggerates the plight of the bay, or as one city official put it, “a well-meaning eccentric.”

Other environmentalists are more heartened by the progress in cleaning up the bay.

“The bay in a lot of areas, like storm-drain pollution, still has major problems,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist who heads Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay. “But we have made remarkable progress in the last 10 to 20 years in pollutant reduction from sewage treatment plants and from industrial waste sources.”

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Don’t try telling that to Fay. In conversations, he lunges irrepressibly at windmills. Big industrial polluters, government sanitation departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, even the Coastal Commission on which he once served--all of them, he complains, have failed to protect his bay.

“You spend your whole life around the ocean, you develop a sense of responsibility to the environment,” he says. “If you don’t respond to your convictions, then what kind of person are you?”

Fay gets an audience for these convictions because he has spent as much time on the bottom of Santa Monica Bay as anyone. A former lifeguard, he began diving off Malibu in 1955, collecting specimens for professors at UCLA and USC, where he did his postdoctoral research attempting to find the cause of death and mutation of great quantities of marine life in the bay.

Forty years ago, Fay’s bay was polluted. Today, he stands along the docks of Marina del Rey and looks down. “This isn’t tropical water,” he says. “It’s Santa Monica Bay water--off-color, sort of brownish. There’s suspended matter in it.”

It embitters him that Los Angeles is better known as an industrial county than a great fishing port. He recalls ruefully how, in the 1930s, heavy industry began discharging hundreds of pounds of effluent a day into the sewer lines that emptied into the bay. How harmful chemicals, including DDT, killed off fish, spoiling a vibrant industry. How the cause of the poisoning was finally traced to a Montrose chemical plant in the late 1960s, a time when DDT concentrations in Santa Monica Bay fish had grown so high the fish could not be exported.

“As far as anyone is concerned, the ocean is here for our amusement and recreation, not sustaining life. It’s not important to people. But to me, it’s my life,” Fay says.

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He contends that drawing-board projects like the Playa Vista housing and studio mega-development near Marina del Rey would mean an avalanche of fresh-water runoff into the bay’s fragile salt water habitats. Some other environmentalists are also concerned, but are withholding their judgment until the developer’s final plans are in.

John Crosse, assistant director of the Los Angeles city bureau of sanitation, takes issue with Fay’s charges of government irresponsibility.

“Our marine biologists think the bay is recovering quite well as to where we were in the mid-1980s,” he said. “Back then, we were discharging five times as much waste. There were impacts to marine life around our outfalls.

“We cleaned up our act in 1989 and have made some dramatic improvements to the ocean bottom around our outfalls,” he said. “We’ve been meeting Environmental Protection Agency standards for treated waste since 1989 and don’t see any long-term damage to the health of Santa Monica Bay.”

Fay’s battle involves not just the bay, but also the diminishing coastal wetlands such as the Ballona Wetlands below the Westchester bluffs. Nearly gone, he says, are the flat shallow marshes around Santa Monica Bay that provide a healthy habitat for baby fish and migrating birds along the coastal flyway.

These were the issues Fay championed during his six years as a coastal commissioner, until he was replaced by a developer in 1979 after state legislators decided that he had antagonized too many people.

“I let people know [that] the most important use of our ocean, other than development, always has been and always will be the receipt of our waste. Waste compromises all other uses. And that’s what they called offending people,” Fay says.

After his Coastal Commission stint ended, Fay largely washed his hands of politics and returned to the sea, harvesting specimens and providing his expertise to environmental causes where needed. But he continues to attend meetings on water quality control and to weigh in with his opinions--and continues to be frustrated at his difficulty in turning people’s attention to pollution.

“When it comes to talking about this bay, I might as well be mute and people might as well be deaf and dumb, especially politicians,” he says.

Dan Frumkes, director of the conservation network for the American Sports Fishing Assn., sees Fay as a rare antidote to people who are “only concerned about what they can see--birds and mammals. Everything else is out of sight, out of mind. But Rimm has made a life of making them look at the sea, to see how we’ve been mismanaging and over-exploiting.”

Adds Dorothy Green, founder of Heal the Bay: “Rimm is one of my favorite characters, someone right out of Steinbeck’s ‘Cannery Row.’ He feels it’s his ocean you’re messing with.”

And being on that water is Fay’s therapy, where he finds solitude and peace. He can’t conceive of hanging up his scuba gear.

“I can’t retire,” he says. “There’s too much I have to do.”