Thanks to a Bolinas resident and a Point Reyes Light columnist, residents and visitors in Baja California have become a great deal smarter about how reckless fishing is decimating fish stocks in the Sea of Cortez.

About a year and a half ago, Ken Masterton, 47, of Bolinas got a call from Jerry Meral, a colleague with the statewide Planning and Conservation League.

"In a joking way, he said, 'Don't read The Sacramento Bee today.' He knows I love the Sea of Cortez," Masterton recalled.

That was the day in December 1995 when The Bee published an ambitious, 17,000-word special report about the Gulf of California and the Mexican government's unwillingness to regulate excessive and wasteful fishing practices.

After reading the five-part series by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tom Knudsen, Masterton contacted The Bee and offered to take copies south when he went on his annual three-week vacation to Baja.

Down at the southern end of the Baja Peninsula, Masterton distributed the report - in some cases to people quoted in it who hadn't seen it. "People would just roll their eyes to the sky and say, 'Oh boy, if we could get this in Spanish...'"

When Masterton returned to California, he telephoned Gregory Favre, executive editor of The Bee. He told the editor how moved he was by the piece. "There's only one problem," he said to Favre. "The people who own the Sea of Cortez don't speak English."

So Favre and Masterton worked out a deal: If Masterton could raise enough money to pay for professional translation and shipping, The Bee would print 50,000 copies free of charge.

Masterton, by trade a political consultant to grassroots organizations, had no problem living up to his end of the deal; he quickly reeled in a $10,000 grant from the Packard Foundation and spent part of it on a Los Angeles-based translator.

But when Masterton showed the translated series of articles to a Mexican conservationist friend, the friend said the translation was "too literal" and wouldn't read well in Baja.

So, with a portion of the grant money still in his pocket, Masterton did what he should have done in the first place. He gave the job to his Spanish teacher, columnist Victor Reyes, who counts English-to-Spanish literary translations among his specialties.

Reyes then labored fulltime for about five weeks turning Knudsen's extensive piece into language that would speak to workaday fisherman, Mexican environmentalists, and Baja's tourist industry.

Reyes said the tricky part was retaining Knudsen's award-winning writing style. "How are you going to respect that style and at the same time make it readable for a lot of people?" he asked himself.

Masterton said Reyes did a masterful job. Noting the series' title, he said, "In English it's 'A Dying Sea.' In Spanish it's 'A Sea in Agony.' He knows how people talk and write in Mexico."

Referring to a sentence in which Knudsen said the Sea of Cortez "is a womb for the Pacific," Reyes said that phrase alone took hours to recreate. The literal Spanish translation for womb - utero or matriz - were dismissed as sounding "too scientific. You eliminate that at the very beginning," he said.

Ultimately, the Spanish phrase that best captured Knudsen's imagery was "Es un claustro materno," which literally means a maternal enclosure, but is also used as a womb metaphor. "That part was not easy," admitted Reyes.

Masterton praised Bee employees for remaining committed to printing the translated series while still working on their usual hectic deadlines.

"It was a labor of love for some members of The Bee staff," he said. "They were excited about the prospects of actually communicating with people in Mexico. The Bee has never ventured into the Spanish language. It was a groundbreaking thing."

Masterton air-freighted thousands of copies of the translation to towns in Baja in early January, and it wasn't long after they hit the streets that Mexican newspapers began debating the merits of hard-hitting series.

Although some journalists and Mexican authorities have largely pooh-poohed the seriousness of the series, Reyes said, the fact that it got any ink at all is cause for celebration.

In general, environmental issues in Mexico are swept under the tapete. "This article could have been about the Copper Canyons in Chihuahua or the forests in Chiapas or the volcanoes around Mexico City, Reyes said.

In the case of the Sea of Cortez, he added, circumstances suggest that little will change, exposŽ or no exposŽ. Try to tell a fisherman not to fish for a year when his family needs to eat tomorrow, Reyes said.

For Masterton, the experience has shed light on a different problem. Environmental groups in the US don't do enough to bring Spanish speakers into the movement.

He said he tried to get the translated Bee series into the Mexican enclaves of California and found that aside the Audubon Society, environmental organizations have no outreach machinery set up for Spanish speakers.

"If environmentalists don't reach out to Spanish-speaking people, it will be to our detriment," Masterton said. "That's one of the challenges of the environmental movement in California."