“How’d you end up with all these women?” skipper Jacqueline Douglas asks Blake Kutner, the sole man in a party of eight on board her salmon fishing charter boat, the Wacky Jacky. “You must be a charmer.”

It’s 5:30 a.m. on a Tuesday and Douglas, known to all as Jacky, is going over ground rules with her passengers before embarking on a long day of fishing on the open sea. Almost all of the passengers are chefs and restaurateurs from La Cocina, the San Francisco kitchen incubator program for women. Like Jacky, they know what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated line of work.

Jacky is San Francisco’s only female sportfishing captain, and has held that mantle since she became the city’s first female captain — 46 years ago.

But what’s more notable than Jacky’s gender is her age: She turned 90 this month and is still taking fishing groups out four to five times a week, still able to withstand long days chasing salmon behind the helm of her 50-foot boat along with her trusted deckhand, John Dresser.

“I love this boat,” Jacky says, stroking its wood paneling. “She’s been good to me, like my fifth child.”

It’s still dark as the Wacky Jacky rocks in its berth next to Castagnola’s restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, and Jacky’s pale face is illuminated by streetlights. About 5 feet tall and thin under a puffy jacket, with silver-blond bangs poking out from her Warriors cap, she has a fragile beauty, a hint of Nancy Reagan’s petite, big-eyed prettiness.

“When you hear that rod go zing, zing, zing, don’t pull too hard. Salmon have very, very soft mouths, like ours,” she says touching her face, and she explains that the hook can go right through it if you yank the rod abruptly. “Then, it’s bye-bye salmon.”

With those final words of advice, she exhorts the passengers to listen to Dresser, who will guide them throughout the day. No one has been salmon fishing before.

“Look at all these hard-working girls,” she says, walking past them to start the engine.

It will take about two hours to get out to the fishing spot north of the Golden Gate. Jacky sits in her captain’s seat with her thin legs dangling high above the floor and looks ahead intently as she pilots through the harbor. As the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge guide her in the darkness, she chats to another skipper on the radio with the camaraderie of those who work when most people are still asleep.

Meanwhile, the passengers huddle in the cabin to share cups of warm arroz con leche, the rice pudding that Veronica Salazar, chef-owner of El Huarache Loco in Larkspur, brought in a Thermos. Some doze, while others browse laminated articles about Jacky. There’s an ad from 1945, when Jacky was a model for the Grand National Rodeo at the Cow Palace. That was 30 years before she became the fleet’s first female captain.

As the sun starts to come up over the East Bay Hills, Dresser smokes a cigarette and stares into the fog, having finished baiting all the rods. He has worked for Jacky for 20 years.

“Too long,” says Dresser, who has his own captain’s license. He says that Jacky first started talking about retiring 15 years ago, promising him her boat. It’s been a biblically long wait.

By the time the boat finally slows down, about half the passengers are curled up in the cabin, seasick. Those who remain on deck include Salazar, Dilsa Lugo of Berkeley’s Los Cilantros, Mariko Grady of Aedan Fermented Foods and Rosa Martinez of Origen, a Oaxacan farmers’ market stand.

Jacky yells, “OK, let’s go fishing!” She keeps the boat at a slow, steady speed to attract the fish.

Within 15 minutes, Martinez’s line starts bouncing and Dresser rushes over, reeling quickly. He barks at her neighbors to move their rods out of the way, and hands the rod to Martinez.

The small woman reels and reels until her arms ache, and reels some more. The crowd yells and it seems like forever until a muscular salmon with green markings can be seen tearing toward the surface of the water. Dresser quickly nets it and pulls it on board.

“I’m still shaking!” Martinez says.

Her fish turns out to be an impressive 24 pounds. Dresser kills it with a club and bleeds it, and then everyone goes back to waiting for the next one.

Jacky’s late husband, George James Douglas XVII, whom she married in 1947, was the one who introduced her to fishing. He took her on a charter fishing boat and she instantly fell in love with the sport.

“It’s a complete vacation. Your mind is so enveloped,” Jacky says.

They bought a few boats over the years, each named the Wacky Jacky, and then she worked as a deckhand for a skipper who encouraged her to get her own captain’s license. She launched her business in 1972 after her youngest daughter, Roni, started college. No one in her family is interested in taking over the business, which is why she plans to leave it to Dresser, at some point.

On the docks, she met plenty of resistance at first.

“There used to be an ‘I hate Wacky Jacky club,’” she says. The male fishermen would taunt her, saying, “I bet she’s doing her dishes,” when they passed by.

“I would say back, ‘No, I use paper plates.’”

But they all soon became close friends, and Jacky has long since been the matriarch of the Bay Area sportfishing fleet. She is on the board of the group’s Golden Gate Fishermen’s Association and has a strong relationship with the younger skippers. “I’m the cougar, they’re my cubs.”

Around 1 p.m., after seven hours at sea, it’s time to head back. Jacky cranks up the engine and begins the return trip, staring ahead wordlessly as though every movement is embedded in muscle memory.

All in all, the trip was a success. The seasick people eventually emerged from the cabin, and though several fish were lost by the inexperienced anglers, there is a whole salmon for each person to take home.

Although she doesn’t get as many female customers as men, Jacky says the women tend to be fierce. “I tell the men, watch out, they’re killers. I’m so proud of them, as a woman.”

After she effortlessly backs the boat into its berth at Fisherman’s Wharf, Jacky finally comes out of her cabin.

She opens a bag of Lay’s potato chips to share with a seagull she calls Abigail and a gray harbor seal she calls Buster.

The passengers are loading their fish into bags. Jacky’s favorite part of the job is watching people enjoy it. Especially with so much in the news that’s sad and difficult, it’s good for people to get away, she says.

Jacky’s daughter Roni, who is very close to her mother, says they decided they would wait until after this year’s salmon season ends, on Oct. 31, to talk about whether Jacky will work again next season, which starts in the spring.

“She always wants to have that open door for being on the boat,” says Roni, who has a dental practice in San Rafael. “Being the warrior she is, nothing surprises me with my mother.”

She trusts that Jacky will do what she needs to do when the time is right, perhaps stepping away from being captain but still going out on trips.

But will she be able to give it up?

“I’m in love with my work,” Jacky says. “For me to give up my boat would kill me.”

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan