A Page from History: Fishing from the decks of Point Loma’s barges

“Our bay here was full of Chinese junks once. It sounds like a dream now, I know. But I was no more than a boy then, and I saw them myself and thought nothing of it at the time. They were so common. The Chinese came all the way over from China just to fish here. And could they sail!  You should have seen them with their colored sails during a blow.” — Max Miller, “The Man on the Barge”

How much could possibly be written about a fishing barge, you might wonder. A paragraph and a half? While I am tempted to reply “We shall all soon see,” what I will say is “More than you might think.”

Since we will also consider a gentleman of some consequence in this community who once devoted an entire book to such a barge and its contemplative skipper (see above), we should be able to complete a few pages. And, as you will see, we will actually be discussing two barges, both of which were known as the Point Loma.

In 1917, a kelp-cutting vessel christened the Point Loma was built for Swift & Co. of San Diego.  Following the First World War, the idle craft was purchased by Hans Carstensen and converted to a fishing barge anchored off Redondo Beach in Los Angeles County.

The Point Loma was the first non-scow (not a flat floating rectangular platform) used as a fishing barge in California. A few years later, the Point Loma was acquired by Captain Oakley J. Hall of Star & Crescent Boat Co. in San Diego.

At his boatyard, San Diego Marine Construction Co., Hall further retrofitted the Point Loma with bunks, cabins, a lunch room and an expanded fishing platform on the stern.

On April Fools’ Day in 1928, the Point Loma was towed out to an anchorage on the southern end of the Point Loma kelp beds. The spot was in the general vicinity of what is now known by divers as Sea Cliffs, or the Ancient Cliffs.

The fishing was excellent and the Point Loma was an immediate success. Free live bait — sardines — and available tackle put real deep-sea fishing within reach of the average angler.

Star & Crescent was in the passenger ferry/water taxi business, and five and sometimes six shore boats made the loop out to the Point Loma daily. Ladies were always encouraged to visit the barge, and a couple of days a week, they fished for free with a paying escort.

Barge fishing did not entirely precede what we think of as sportfishing today, with the many cattle boat and charter operations that call Point Loma home, but it certainly recalls an earlier time. That time was what we think of as the Depression era and the pre-World War II period.

Other very popular fishing barges were in operation in the mid-1920s. The famous Olympic off Hermosa Beach and Santa Monica’s Star of Scotland were two of them. The Point Loma even had local competition from the Ike Walton, originally anchored off La Jolla, and later the Kohala. But none of those operations could match the location and the great fishing off the Point Loma kelp beds that the Point Loma called home.

“Aboard the barge Point Loma on Sunday, E.R. Kenoyer of this city caught a yellowtail weighing 18 pounds,” reported the National City Star News on July 11, 1930. “The catch was the largest of 30 yellowtails caught aboard the barge on the one day. The week’s score for barracuda on the Point Loma was approximately 1,500.”

The paper recorded early-morning fishing as good, followed by a midmorning lull and “excellent sport during the afternoon, when the surface was ruffled by a customary light breeze.”

Kelp bass were also plentiful, as were bonito and mackerel, and treasured white sea bass were also frequently caught. But the prospect of landing a yellowtail, a serious game fish and great eating, excited barge anglers.

Now just who was this Man on the Barge? Let’s introduce him:

“Until a few years ago he had not heard of a fishing barge even. Nor could he have told the difference between a yellowtail and a barracuda. He knew salmon and trout, but they were of northern waters. They were not here.

“He knew all the answers by now. There were times when he felt he knew almost everything about fish and fishermen by now, how many barracuda would be caught before the last shore boat returned to town and how many mackerel and how many yellowtail. Also, he felt he almost could tell ahead of time how much tackle would be lost overboard before evening and what type of person would lose it. He could pick out the person the moment he or she stepped aboard. They would arrive as strangers, most of them, and they would depart as intimate friends, begging even a snapshot of him probably. ‘Mind if I snap you? Or better, let’s both be snapped together.’ 

“Today was simply the start of another day in summer, was all. God must feel the same way, he thought when shore boats bring him more souls each morning.”

Former San Diego Sun waterfront reporter Max Miller referred to his fishing barge skipper by only his first name, John. John’s associate, the agreeable younger deckhand, Walt, is the only other recurring character in the collection of sketches called “The Man on the Barge” (1935), Miller’s fifth book. He does not give his barge a name.

“I’ve been here so long that even the seagulls must recognize me,” Miller muses in beginning “I Cover the Waterfront,” a very improbable bestseller published in 1932.

In fact, he was not yet 30 and had only been covering port activities in this harbor of the sun for six years when fame and good fortune came calling at his studio above a tugboat office. Miller had been working unsuccessfully on several novels when his collection of experiential short stories and observations found an audience.

“This book has the touch of something dangerously like pure genius,” L.A. Times critic Harry Carr declared. Gee, I think I might put something like that prominently on the cover of my book, too.

“I Cover the Waterfront” inspired the popular hit tune of the same name by Johnny Green, with lyrics by Edward Heyman. The song is a jazz standard. I knew it as a Billie Holliday tune in my younger days — we had that record — but the track has been covered by everybody from Sarah Vaughan to John Lee Hooker.

The book also served very loosely as the basis for the popular film “I Cover the Waterfront,” a vehicle for the cute actress Claudette Colbert. The film, of course, had a plot, unlike Miller’s book.  A smuggling ring is sniffed out and broken up by a diligent and valiant waterfront reporter. But did he get the girl? I won’t ruin it for you.

But some sources claim the film was at least partially re-scored to include and take advantage of the popularity of the hit song.

None of the above hurt the sales of Miller’s first published book.

Miller wrote a dozen titles more popular and held in higher regard than “The Man on the Barge.” It may be a little uneven in spots. But where it shines, it is wonderful. And are any of those other books about barges, I ask you? Of course not.

San Diego reporter Jerry MacMullen, author of “They Came by Sea,” opined that “in many ways ‘The Man on the Barge’ was Miller’s best work.”

Kirkus Reviews, in a very brief paragraph, judged that it was not. What do they know?

Like many men and women of the period — and of any period in time, really — John had been looking for work when he came across the out-of-commission barge with Walt squatting aboard.

“The trouble with having been out of work in this small city, he remembered, was that the climatic atmosphere did not lend itself to the mood he should have been in. He should have walked the pavements with thin soles washed in rain water. His overcoat collar should have been turned high, almost to his hat. But he did not wear an overcoat, and seldom did he wear a hat. And always, or almost always, the sun had accompanied him from a perfect sky.”

John is no Everyman. He can be slightly moralistic. He is concerned about the welfare of a working girl who finds her way on board the barge and about some of Walt’s choices. He is prickled by a couple of know-it-all anglers, but he is generous, thoughtful and grateful for the serendipitous position in which he finds himself.

“’And come to think of it, what a dooryard I have,’ he said to himself. ‘What an estate! It extends everywhere and includes everything.’

“The sea lions which bobbed up around his barge could have been his own dogs out on his lawn romping. He did not have to feed them. They fed themselves. Nor did he have to strap a license around their necks, nor tie them up should he care to go to town.” 

But this skipper, John, did not care to go to town.

“What a self-supporting little planet was this fishing barge. It had its own lunch counter, its own staterooms and, for that matter, its own laundry. All the barge lacked was a place to go. It had to remain stationary while all around it, vessels were free to cover the earth’s face. But the same vessels, to be sure, returned again. And what the men aboard them meanwhile had seen, John could also see through their eyes. Tourists from the liners came out to fish. So did certain members of the crew. These visitors in a sense served as John’s agents. He could pretend if he liked that he himself had sent them out to return to him later bearing their reports.

“Conversations with men fishing, he soon discovered, are far more illuminating than lectures by professional travelers. Men in conversation do not have to keep glancing at their watches, nor do they have to govern their words for a mixed audience. The world was delivered to him, then, through the observations of a hundred eyes instead of two, and through the records of a hundred minds instead of one.

“If his barge was unable to go anywhere, what of it? For if movement was all that counted, he should, for that matter, envy the captain of the ferryboat inside the harbor. The ferryboat was on the go all day long, covering more miles in a day than the barge would cover in a century. But its captain learned nothing from his passengers, the main reason being that the captain did not have a chance to bait hooks. The captain instead had to remain up on the topside in the cubbyhole of his pilot house. The whole world to him was two ferry slips, and his whole absorption in life was not to bump too hard.

“‘And yes,’ John thought, ‘he probably feels sorry for me out here because I don’t move at all. I just stay put and let the others do the moving.’

“By ‘others,’ John did not mean only his visitors. He also meant the moon and the sun and the tides. They did all the moving for him. And always they came back from where they started. At least almost always. Up till now, anyway.”

Over 200 yellowtail between 10 and 25 pounds were taken by anglers aboard the Point Loma one September day in 1930. Twenty-five large white sea bass were landed one day that August, and a monster 250-pound black sea bass was brought aboard by two anglers a week earlier.

The bite was great, the barge remained popular and it should be noted that not only were there no limits in those days, anglers of the era would have scoffed at the notion of catch and release.

After a very productive four-year career, Captain Hall retired the aging Point Loma. In his excellent collection “Fishing Barges of California 1921-1998,” Ed Reis tells us that the barge was beached on “a mudflat adjacent to the shipyard. The Great Depression was at its height and homeless men soon found shelter in the stranded barge. Hall allowed them access during the winter, but in the following spring, the old wooden hull was cut up and used for firewood.”

The Point Loma had been a consistent moneymaker for Star & Crescent, and Hall did not intend to let that business luff. Star & Crescent soon acquired the sturdy three-masted schooner Glendale, a 175-foot former lumber carrier. Star & Crescent tugboat Cuyamaca towed the Glendale into San Diego Marine Construction Co. in February 1932. Hall’s plans were to convert the Glendale into the “world’s finest fishing barge.”

Reis tells us the former schooner soon became “undoubtedly the best-appointed fishing barge in the business. The bulwarks in the stern were cut down to main deck level, and the deck widened out to provide extra fishing space. Two big deck houses were erected enclosing bunks for 30, a galley and a ladies’ lounge. Promenade decks with picnic tables and awnings topped the houses.  A ‘bachelor’s hall’ was located in the forecastle for those who wished to read or play cards. Bait wells holding 40 tons of water and 100,000 sardines were built into the hull.”

The New Point Loma was anchored in the familiar spot off the Point Loma kelp beds in May 1932.

Remarkable fish counts were the norm for the New Point Loma, as they had been for its predecessor. Thousands of yellowtail and barracuda were landed, as well as an occasional bluefin and once … a marlin.

The annual San Diego Harbor Department publication, Port of San Diego, extolled the virtues of the barge in 1936:

“From the deck of the modern fishing barge Point Loma, anchored in the kelp beds off Point Loma during the summer months, many fish dinners are produced for rod and reel devotees. Live bait is used exclusively. The barge practically eliminates all possibility of seasickness for those who are inclined to be affected on the live bait boats, and anglers, both men and women, may fish for yellowtail, bonito, barracuda, bass, etc., amid conditions catering to every comfort and convenience. Shore boats operate daily between the barge and the foot of Broadway on frequent schedules.”

In spite of continued sensational fishing, barge attendance had begun to decline in 1935. Attendance continued to flag in the second half of the decade. Hall would finally sell the New Point Loma to interests in San Pedro, and 1940 would prove to be its final summer anchored off the Point.

“At noon the sky had been cloudless, a typical summer day. But now, John noticed, the sky had completely reversed itself. In place of no clouds the sky now had no blue. Over in the northwest, a cloud drape hung down as from a ceiling. Rain must be falling over there, a shower. The cloud drape had the effect of a lace curtain untidily hung. It was moving shoreward, gliding broadside between sky and sea, hiding everything behind and under.

“The cloud drape had grown larger and darker. A new wind was driving it along. John could feel the wind coming even before it touched him. And when the black veil from the northwest closed down upon the barge, covering it with a slow rain, John had the sensation that only voices had been aboard that day … and now the voices had dissolved, leaving only the warm rain. And it was so warm, it, too, could have been nothing.”

Eric DuVall is president of the Ocean Beach Historical Society. Membership in OBHS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is $25 annually. Visit obhistory.org.