About Kirk Lombard
My name is Kirk Lombard and I am many things: writer, teacher, musician…actor, inveterate blogger, raconteur…commercial fisherman, puppet master…tenor, baseball historian, and…champion eel fisherman. I wrote The Sea Forager's Guide to Northern California (Heyday Press), and show people how to fish and forage on my tours. Visit my youtube channel for my video adventures and shenanigans.
In addition to all these, I am deeply passionate about our California marine resources. I worked for 7 years as a fisheries observer for the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. In that capacity it became my professional duty to find out what the local citizenry was fishing for. Onboard rockfish boats off the Farallones I counted rockfish; on the piers I checked herring, jacksmelt, stripers, pile perch; on the beaches I saw how surf and night smelt were captured; in the hidden coves I checked in on goose barnacle poachers, (not because I had to, because I wanted to); in downtown San Francisco I watched homeless, drop-line-wielding grandmothers, pull rockfish after rockfish out of storm drains. You want to get deep with this stuff? Talk to me.
I also spent 14 years as an art teacher and counselor for severely emotionally disturbed kids in the Bay Area. My band Rube Waddell, for which I sing, play the tuba, the harmonica, and pluck my own hand-made junkyard diddley bows (one-string slide guitars), has toured Europe and the United States. Rube Waddell has been a mainstay in the underground music scene of San Francisco for 17 years, has produced 4 albums, and has appeared in virtually every venue in San Francisco — including the shoe store on the corner of 22nd and Mission (Live At Leeds, yo!) and Candlestick Park. The things I'm not telling about myself are these: 12 years as a (third generation) equity actor in NY; reciter of Robert Service Poems (just ask... or don’t); founding member of The Apocalypse Puppet Theater Co. (for whom I have written four full length puppet plays); writer of massive, unpublishable (some might say Proustian) novels; maker of gigantic papier maché faces; owner of an 83-mile-an-hour fastball in 1989.
The Fishwife and I (Camilla Lombard) founded Sea Forager Tours & Seafood CSF in 2013 and are raising our wee ones, Django and Penelope, on sea shanties and herring. We run our mom and pop fish biz together, and you can read a little more about us here and here.
Come take my tours or buy our fish! Beyond everything else the thing I am most passionate about is the big blue sea, and all the wonderful things in it. Peruse the hundreds of posts on The Monkeyface News blog (named for the local prickleback species commonly known as a monkeyface eel, C. violaceus, for which I own the current state record) and you will see that I have a lot of interests and experiences beyond fish, all of which inform and enhance the tours I give and the fish I sell. I hope we can get fishy together! --Kirk out