GOLD BEACH — Scanning the Rogue River mouth aboard coastal Oregon's only Sea Lion Patrol boat, Mark Lottis spies a bowling ball-like head bobbing in the surf.

Lottis kicks the outboard on his wooden river boat into gear. Angled downstream, the boat slices sideways through the incoming tidal swells toward the California sea lion trying to sneak past Lottis' watch.

"You got to get an angle on them," Lottis says.

Moments later, Lottis eases close enough to lob a firecracker-like "seal bomb" toward the trespassing creature, which heads back to sea while all but flipping his middle fin at Lottis.

"It's gotten to the point where if they even see me coming they swim away, looking over their shoulders," Lottis says. "They know what's going to happen."

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Lottis has taken the Rogue bay away from salmon-munching sea lions and given anglers more than a fighting chance to catch and keep the chinook salmon they hook this summer where the Rogue meets the sea.

Bankrolled by fishermen frustrated at losing hard-to-catch chinook to sea lions, Lottis' first three weeks as the official pinniped hazer for the Port of Gold Beach have been widely considered a rousing success.

With an arsenal of seal bombs and "popper shells" — shotgun shells with a secondary firecracker — Lottis has succeeded in running off groups of California and Stellar sea lions before the salmon-thieving begins.

For the rest of them, there's channel 10. That's the marine radio frequency that bay anglers use to report a sea lion in the bay.

"If any sneak past us, the fishermen let us know," says Lottis, who stepped aside from full-time guiding to be the everyday hazer through September. "It's like there's 100 spotters out there."

The results are irrefutable, says Lottis, who patrols to applause from anglers literally handing money over the gunnel to help fund the program.

By some accounts, sea lions will intercept and bite 50-70 percent of the chinook hooked during the bay's popular fall chinook season now under way.

Since Lottis launched the pilot hazing program July 19, anglers have not reported losing a single salmon to a seal or sea lion.

"God-dogs is it working," says Roy Cockle from the Curry Sportfishing Association, the fishing group that pledged $40,000 toward the pilot hazing effort.

"It's like going to Vegas — you put up your money and you take your chances," Cockle says. "Well, we paid a lot of money to take this chance and it's working."

And what's happening in Gold Beach might not stay in Gold Beach.

Other port with salmon-stealing sea lions are watching Lottis closely to see if his initial successes could be matched there.

State and federal biologists who helped Lottis launch the hazing program are also watching Lottis' operation closely.

They, too, are amazed how a combination of hazing, no longer dumping filleted carcasses in the bay and chasing sunning sea lions off port docks has rendered sea lions no factor in the fall chinook fishery to date.

"To go that many days in a row and not have a single animal come in and take a fish is a great success," says Garth Griffin, the NOAA-Fisheries biologists who helped the Port secure federal permits to haze the protected sea lions.

"I've been out with (Lottis) a few times and the good news was that it was a little bit boring," Griffin says. "That's a measure of success."

In the past, sea lions have been anything but boring in the Rogue estuary.

The various species are all protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which bans all harming and harassing of these species. However, the act contains a provision that people in the act of fishing can use non-lethal deterrents like seal bombs to ward off seals threatening to take a fish away.

However, if the seal bomb accidentally kills a wild coho salmon or other threatened species, then that hazing runs afoul of the federal Endangered Species Act.

Likewise, Stellar sea lions are protected as a threatened species and cannot legally be hazed by anglers in the act of fishing. But the Port, through state and federal permits, has the authority to haze Stellar sea lions stealing fish in the bay as well as California sea lions and harbor seals so long as the hazer isn't fishing.

Lottis, through the Port, also has an incidental taking permit should a wild coho get killed in the process.

To date, no negative impacts to any salmon or steelhead have been detected, Griffin says.

Lottis patrols about 10 hours each day, using about 20 seal bombs and popper shells on sea lions that already seem to associate his boat with trouble.

The program is so popular that the port has pledged half of future launch fees toward the hazing. The Curry Anadromous Sportsmen, for which Lottis is president, will hold a salmon derby Aug. 26 in the bay to fund hazing this year and next, Lottis says.

Griffin says he doubts the program will extend beyond Gold Beach, where the bay's configuration, the town's unified willingness to take on the pinnipeds and the organizational abilities of Lottis made it happen.

"Undoubtedly, we'll get calls from other communities that want help with sea lions," Griffin says. "Really, this community did it. They just needed our help.

"I don't know if we would have another community with this much interest, and I don't know how many more Mark Lottises there are in these communities."