Introducing... Me:

My name is Kirk, and I am many things:writer, teacher, musician…
actor, inveterate blogger, raconteur…
commercial fisherman, puppet master…
tenor, baseball historian, and…
champion eel fisherman.

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 CA. Dept. of Fish and Game. 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 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 full length 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: 10 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.

That pretty much does it.

Come take my tours. Believe it or not, the thing I really love to talk about, isn't myself, it's 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 -- and believe me, these all inform and enhance the tours I give.

Want to contact me? It's easy.

Just click the “Email” link icon, at the bottom of every page -- and send me an email!

Feel lucky?
Try calling my cel:
415-368-6634