board member

Dan Bacher

Two passions define Dan Bacher’s backstory – fishing and social justice. 

Regarding fishing: Dan first dropped a line in the water at the age of five. The locale was the “cement ship,” a derelict hulk lodged at the end of the Seacliff State Beach fishing pier in Aptos.

“My father took me out there and I caught a couple of tomcod,” Dan recalls. “They were really small, but that didn’t matter to me. The hook was set – I was a dedicated fisherman from that point on.”

A year later, Dan’s father took him to the North Fork of the American River, where he caught a rainbow trout. But then his fishing career took a hiatus. Dan’s dad wasn’t a fanatical angler, and the family lived in Sacramento, far from the coast and the Sierra Rivers. Dan didn’t have much opportunity to fish again until he was around 10, when he set out on his own angling adventures or went to fish Folsom Lake with his aunt Alicerae.

“Sacramento actually had some great fishing options in the Sacramento and American rivers,” said Dan, “and I was riding all over the place on my bicycle. The American River became my go-to destination. I basically taught myself to fish, and I caught a lot of fish there – steelhead, trout, striped bass.  I had to let them all go, though – I was riding my bike, and I couldn’t carry around an ice chest to keep them fresh.” 

Dan fished through his teens, refining his skills and racking up an impressive record for the size, number and diversity of fish he landed. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at Santa Clara University near San Jose.

“But I didn’t give up on angling,” he observes. “I worked during the summers, but I also fished every chance I got.”

Dan majored in history, but he also took engineering and science classes, which he enjoyed immensely. After taking his degree, he faced a familiar challenge for recent college graduates: earning a living. 

But he was also driven by his second great passion – making a difference, particularly in disenfranchised and underserved communities.   

“After graduating from college, I got a chance to work for the United Farmworkers Union as a full-time volunteer for 2-1/2 years following part-time volunteer work for the union as a student,” Dan says. “It was a tremendous opportunity, and I couldn’t pass it up. This was in the mid-Seventies. The UFW was highly active at that time and was having a lot of success organizing people in the farm worker community. During my time with the union, I learned a lot about activism and political power. One thing I learned still sticks with me – you can’t ask entrenched corporate and political interests to be equitable. You have to be strong and astute enough to successfully assert your rights – to take what is properly yours, in other words.”

Dan discovered he didn’t have to give up fishing during his tenure at the UFW – in fact, he found some of his fellow staffers shared his enthusiasm.  

“Ruben Serna was a major organizer, and the head of the UFW’s Stockton office,” Dan says, “and he was an absolute fishing fanatic. He fished the Delta constantly, and he always kept his gear in his car in case a fishing opportunity presented itself. Cesar Chavez told me a story once. He had asked Gil Padilla, a UFW board member, to meet with Serna to discuss some issues. And Serna wanted to meet Padilla out on a slough in the Delta so they could fish and discuss union issues. He told Padilla not to worry – that he had an extra rod in his car for him. A lot of people in the union thought Serna was nuts, but that guy was my hero.”

Though Dan worked for the UFW full time, the position was really more than a job. It required a complete commitment of time and heart, and after a point he began feeling burnt out.

“I finally left in September 1978 and I immediately went fishing for salmon and steelhead on the American River,” says Dan. “It was the first time I had been on a vacation in years, and it was like coming back home. I could feel myself unwinding completely.”

But he still pursued social work, taking on a position at a nonprofit child care information and referral agency in Santa Clara. And he maintained his contacts with the farmworker community. One of his connections was Felix Alvarez, a former member of the farmworker theater group - El Teatro Campesino - and, not surprisingly, a dedicated angler.

“We played music together, and we started fishing together for rock cod in this small, leaky little skiff,” Dan says. “Then one day we were invited out on a charter boat out of Monterey and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was a completely flat, calm day, and we fished the deep water offshore. We just kept pulling up these big beautiful red rockfish – it was incredible. So Felix, our friends, and I started going out on charter boats regularly. And when we weren’t on the charters, we kept fishing in that little skiff.”

Dan recalls this period as the most idyllic of his life.

“I loved San Jose, because I was only a half hour from Santa Cruz Harbor and Monterey Bay,” he says. “We caught practically every fish you could catch there, other than white sea bass – rockcod, ling cod, salmon, sharks, striped bass. And not only were there a lot of fish – they were big.  The fishery was still holding up pretty well back then.”

Dan and his friends did more than fish when they were out on the water. They also talked about fishing, including wondering whether there was some way they could devote more time to it – maybe even make a living from it. 

“One day Felix and I were out fishing with a lawyer we knew,” Dan says. “The attorney was complaining about working for a law firm, and I was doing the same about working for a nonprofit. It turned out that both of us wanted to write. He wanted to be a scriptwriter, and I wanted to get into journalism. So that discussion made me decide I should start getting serious about it. I took some courses on freelance writing at DeAnza College, and I began pitching ideas.”

Dan got some initial assignments from the Spanish newspaper El Observador – mainly writing profiles about Latino community members.

“It was a start, but I wanted to do more,” he says, “and more specifically, I wanted to write about issues related to fisheries and the environment.”

One day in 1983, Dan decided to go steelhead fishing on the American River. But when he got to the river, he found that it was “blown out:” the water was high and turbid, and the conditions were unfishable.

“So to kill some time, I went to a bookstore and browsed around,” Dan says. “And there was this new publication for sale – The Fish Sniffer. It was a tabloid-style newspaper dedicated completely to fishing in the West, mainly northern and central California. I leafed through it, and I saw that they didn’t have anyone covering the San Jose area or Monterey Bay, so I wrote a pitch letter, suggesting a column. And they went for it.”

Dan freelanced columns for The Fish Sniffer for two years and was offered a full time staff position with the Sacramento-based publication in 1985. 

“I took then up on it, and moved back to Sacramento,” he says. “My role expanded significantly. I wrote features on a wide range of subjects, and I started doing trade shows as well.  And eventually, I became a co-owner. We had a wide readership – anybody who was serious about fishing in California back then read our paper, and I was proud to be a part of it.”

Under Dan’s influence and the leadership of the paper’s publisher, Hal Bonslett, The Fish Sniffer also adopted a more aggressive stance on the state of the fisheries and the degradation of their critical habitats.

“We started publishing pointed and well-researched editorials on a range of conservation issues – threatened salmonids such as the winter-run Chinook salmon, and the necessity for conservative limits on striped bass, sturgeon and other gamefish species. And I was gratified that our readership reacted so positively to what we were saying. We helped turn anglers – by nature an independent lot – into a group of dedicated environmental activists.”

In 1991, Dan and Hal became board members of United Anglers of California, a group of sport fishermen who lobbied and litigated for greater gamefish protections.

“Together we worked on supporting the federal Miller-Bradley bill, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act that was signed by George H. W. Bush in October of 1992. We had a lot of hopes for the CVPIA. As written, it promised to make a huge difference for the fish by ensuring greater environmental water releases and ambitious habitat improvement programs. Things didn’t turn out as planned due to inadequate implementation and enforcement, but for a while we were pretty optimistic.”

As Delta smelt, salmon and other fish species collapsed due to record exports from the state and federal pumping facilities on the Delta, Dan says, “I also teamed up with Bill Jennings, an incredibly astute and dedicated policy guy with the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and a board member of the California Water Impact Network.”

Dan recalls, “Bill and I also alerted major media on the ongoing and illegal massacre of native fish at the huge state and federal project pumps in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, and the refusal of government regulators to address the issue.’

It was a huge story, and Dan and Bill were able to get good placement with the San Francisco Chronicle and other outlets.

 “But it was like playing whack-a-mole,” he says.  “We’d get some concessions from the regulators, and they’d be overturned or blatantly ignored a few years later. More and more water was – and is – being diverted from the Delta, and the fish keep spiraling downward.”

Eventually, both Dan and Bill joined forces with the California Water Impact Network. Bill served on C-WIN’s board until his death in 2022, and Dan is both a board member and an advisor on fishery issues. 

Dan continues to cover water policy issues for a number of publications, including the Daily Kos and Stockton Record. Many of his stories, he notes, collectively resemble the movie Groundhog Day: year after year, the story remains unchanged.  Water continues to flow at subsidized rates to corporate Central Valley farms to the detriment of urban ratepayers, the environment, and fisheries. 

“Really, the deep story – the real story – isn’t about Delta water policy, or the volume of water that goes through the Delta or to corporate agriculture in any given year, or who benefits and who suffers,” he observes. “The real problem is that the regulators have been captured by the regulated. Agribusiness calls the tune, and the state and federal regulators dance as expected. Until that changes, California’s water crisis will only intensify.