Summer is slipping away. But it’ll never quite leave us, least of all in San Diego County, whose five dreamy ocean piers produce memories that last a lifetime.
Few people forget the joy of casting a fishing line over the railing to snag perch and corbina, or of shredding glassy waves that charge up from the south. The piers are where we go to exhale and watch the sun set. There’s no better vantage point.
The San Diego Union-Tribune heard all about it in recent weeks from locals nursing passions for our weathered piers in Oceanside, La Jolla Shores, Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach and Imperial Beach.
There were many smiles, many remembrances — and some anxious questions and hopes for the piers’ futures.
When will the outer half of Crystal Pier reopen to the public — and what about the fire-damaged Oceanside Pier? When will the Scripps Research Pier resume showing visitors its scientists’ work?
Can’t anyone stop the flow of sewage-tainted water that’s dampened the draw of the Imperial Beach Pier? And once the Ocean Beach Pier is rebuilt, how might it change a community?
In the end, San Diegans always seem to return to the sweet moments — particularly as we look back on another summer anchored by the pilings of our favorite piers.
For Jan Edward Ronis, a lawyer in Coronado, that moment was skipping school to jump off the Imperial Beach Pier in the middle of a heat wave in 1963.
For John Daley, it was escaping home at age 6 to walk two blocks to the Oceanside Pier to buy a dime’s worth of smoked fish.
For Eve Anderson, it was emerging with her husband from their cottage to find “a big, huge, full moon sitting on the arch of Crystal Pier,” she recalls — “the most gorgeous thing.”
For Sean Woodard, it was watching all three of his sons participate in one of the Ocean Beach Pier’s most time-honored traditions — leaping from its decks in junior lifeguard training.
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And for Ana Lombrozo, it’s 40 years of moments at the Scripps Pier — a first kiss, a breakup, couples she’s seen get engaged.
“And it changes daily. The colors and shading of the water are always different. So are the waves, and the surfers going by. Sometimes, you see the shadows of the pier’s pilings reflected in the wet sand. And there’s always the sound of the surf,” she says. “It’s easy to find peace here.”
Trey Allan Rondo, surfer, Oceanside
You won’t get any locals-only attitude from Trey Allan Rondo, a 16-year-old with hair the color of gold. He wants everybody to know the pleasures and perils of surfing Oceanside, whose working-class, family-friendly vibe has withstood the recent addition of pricey hotels and timeshares across from the pier.
“Some days you wake up and find fun, playful waves,” he said. “Other days, you’ll find heavy barrels that you might be scared to paddle into.”
The key is to know where to set up — and for him, that’s where the bait shop is on the pier.
“That’s the spot,” he explained. “I remember pulling into one barrel on the south side, and I could see so clearly. It’s like nothing else in the world. You feel, ‘I just did that.’ It’s ingrained forever in my mind.”
So is something else — surfing at night, by the weak lights of the pier. “You can’t see much, so you don’t know what’s coming,” he said. “It’s so exciting.”
Bill Curtis, lifeguard caption, Oceanside
Where are the fire trucks? We need them, now!
Bill Curtis reacted in an instant on April 24 when white smoke began to billow from a vacant diner at the end of the mostly wooden Oceanside Pier. He ran toward the fire, making sure no one was caught in its path.
“I turned around and saw the trucks coming,” said Curtis, the city’s lifeguard captain since 2008. “I thought, ‘Come on, guys, get out here, please.’ There was so much smoke you couldn’t see all the way to the end.”
The blaze was knocked down with little damage to most of the pier. A moment of clarity followed for Curtis, a 65-year-old Oceanside native.
“When I got home, I told my wife that I didn’t fully realize until then just how much this pier means to me,” he said. “It’s part of my family. It resonates. It’s something that we cannot lose.”
Reinhard Flick, oceanographer, UC San Diego
Holy cow, Reinhard Flick thought as he watched colossal waves crash over the original Scripps Pier in the winter of 1983 — an El Niño year that brought historic rains to Southern California.
From the window of his office in the Center for Coastal Studies, located at the pier entrance, the oceanographer could see the pier’s redwood planks torn from their bolts, flung high into the air by the relentless churn.
“It had survived storms before,” he recalls, “but nothing like ’83.”
Flick has worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for more than half a century, and for all the time he’s spent on the current pier, he’s also got a reverence for the old one. After all, it was there that he conducted his graduate school research, and it was there that he and his friends went skinny dipping on a few Friday evenings.
After that storm in ’83, “the old girl” was damaged but still working, Flick said. Scientists soon resumed bringing ocean water to the Birch Aquarium and taking the water temperature — a practice that has been done every day, give or take a few, since the pier was built in 1916.
But the damage was serious, and the new pier was built in 1988. Today, gone are the wooden planks, replaced with reinforced concrete. “This pier would laugh if it saw those ’83 storms,” Flick chuckles.
Mary Munk, environmentalist, La Jolla Shores
From time to time, a certain type of plankton bloom forms along the coast, carrying single-cell organisms that produce blue-green flashes that are visible at night when they hit things, like this pier’s pilings and ever-present surfers. It’s called bioluminescence, and it makes Mary Munk swoon.
“I remember one night in particular,” said Munk, the widow of famed oceanographer Walter Munk.
“Surfers weren’t alone in the water. Dolphins also were swimming through. They both lit up. There were sparkles everywhere. It was like a Fourth of July show — just magical. I’ve seen the flashes many times at the pier. But on that night it was spectacular.”
Melissa Carter, staff researcher, UC San Diego
For 25 years, Melissa Carter has had the opportunity to experience Scripps Pier unlike many others — underwater. She and her research colleagues often dive beneath it to service the equipment strapped to one of its pilings.
The Automated Shore Station is one of several attached to piers along California’s coastline as part of the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System. It’s used to advance our global understanding of the ocean.
For Carter, the work is thrilling and rewarding — seeing data collected in seconds that once took weeks, and seeing it put to good use, offering early warnings of harmful algal blooms.
But her favorite part? The creatures she gets to glimpse while down below the surface, like an octopus and a curious lobster that live by the station, sometimes a leopard shark or bat ray — and once even an ocean sunfish.
Randy Dible, photographer, Point Loma
For a kid who “never stopped getting into trouble,” the Crystal Pier witnessed some of Randy Dible’s most unruly moments growing up in Pacific Beach in the 1970s.
There was the time he and two friends got drunk after finding a case of Brown Derby beer — the kind his grandfather drank — covered in barnacles and buried under the pier.
Better yet was when his stepmom forbade him from going anywhere but to fish at the pier, right next to the surf shop his family owned. When his friend showed up and invited him to a party, he quickly left to get “snockered.”
“But then I’m like, well, I’m supposed to be fishing out on the pier; I’ve got to pretend,” recalled Dible, now a surf photographer. “So I went out to the pier, bought a bunch of bait and smeared it all over me.”
His stepmom, he said, was one step ahead of him — she’d already spied him leaving the pier. “I came back smelling like bait for no reason.”
Pamela Taylor, former bait shop owner, Pacific Beach
To her young customers, Pamela Taylor was better known as Miss Pam during the 13 years her family owned Crystal Pier Bait and Tackle.
Seeing kids — many of them repeat customers, staying at the cottages on Crystal Pier year after year — develop a patience and zeal for fishing was the best part of the job.
Taylor recalls the day a boy of about 5 came up to her with a fish in a bucket, “talking to me 100 miles an hour” in a language she didn’t recognize.
But his excitement she did recognize. She snapped his photo and put it in the bait shop window. Eleven years later, he returned for another year of fishing at the pier.
“If you can imagine being a kid, catching a shark or your first fish — the smile that’s on that face,” she said. “It’s just something you never forget, and it’s something they never forget.”
Jack Innis, author and former bait shop owner, Bay Park
If you fished on the Crystal Pier during the 1960s to ‘80s, you probably knew the name Old Joe.
Most days, he’d arrive at the Pacific Beach pier with a bait bucket in one hand and a stout fishing rod in the other, recalls Jack Innis, the local author of “San Diego Legends” who owned the Crystal Pier Bait and Tackle shop in the early ’80s.
Old Joe’s signature outfit? A blue skipper’s hat with leather brim, a worn blue coat, gray pants and scuffed black shoes.
“No day passed when he didn’t come in and say, ‘Hey, Pancho, did I leave my bait bucket in here?’” Innis said. He’d remind Old Joe his name was Jack, but it never caught on.
Old Joe would always buy a Pepsi and ask to “sit down and rest my hind legs” after a morning on the pier, Innis remembers. And over the years, Old Joe would regale him with fishing stories, some more believable than others.
Few of Innis’ many fond memories of the pier compare with the time spent with the man he says “lived life on his own terms.”
John Alvarado, fisherman and Good Neighbor Project co-founder, Logan Heights
John Alvarado has been fishing on the Ocean Beach Pier ever since it opened. It quickly became one of his favorite places, an escape from gangs, drugs — all of life’s problems, really.
“It was a place I could go to literally free my mind and fill my soul,” he said. “The ocean, and access to it, saved my life.”
So when he and his wife founded the Good Neighbor Project in 2008 to educate and support local youth, it was a no-brainer to share his favorite place with them — many had never seen the ocean.
He teaches the kids to fish, both as a training tool for real-life skills and as a form of therapy. And though he’s heartbroken the pier is now closed, he’s eager to make new memories with new kids on a new pier.
Jordan Finkelstein, surf correspondent, San Diego
Jordan Finkelstein calls herself a “pier rat.” Her definition? “Someone who voraciously surfs at a pier amongst the crowded masses, scampering, scrambling, competing and otherwise going crazy catching waves and hanging out at a pier at all hours of the day and night.”
After learning to surf near piers in Galveston, Texas, she sought out the same when she moved to San Diego.
She found that and more.
“The OB Pier provided a place of deep introspection, escape, discovery and privacy for me,” Finkelstein said, and “a go-to best friend, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
Her favorite time to surf was at night, catching waves by the lights of passing cars on Newport Avenue. And walking out onto the pier then, especially during large swells, was “totally radical,” she recalls. “Your whole body would struggle to maintain balance.”
And in 1987, she even surfed all five piers in one day, until her arms could barely paddle anymore — a personal feat she chalked up to “pier pressure.”
Today, with the pier closed, Finkelstein feels she’s lost that friend — for now, anyway.
“A rebuild can’t replace the experiences I have had with the current structure, but might possibly offer a new relationship,” she added.
Rick Dower, retired business writer, Point Loma
Rick Dower was lucky enough to visit the Ocean Beach Pier with his father the day it opened — “a noisy celebration in July 1966,” when he was 11, he recalled.
On summer days, he’d hang a bucket and tackle box from the handlebars of his high-rise Stingray bicycle and strap his fishing rod to the sissy bar for the short ride down to the pier.
“I became a dedicated ocean fisherman almost immediately,” he said. “I baited fresh clams or frozen peas I picked up for 19 cents a box at the nearby Mayfair Market to lure fat green opaleye or shimmery perch or even — the best prize — a calico bass I could haul over the railing.”
He outgrew fishing — but not the pier. “If I ever had an important decision to weigh, or just wanted some ‘me’ time, that’s where I’d head,” he said.
Much later, Dower began coaxing his own young son to try his luck in his same old fishing spot at the surfline — “same views, same fishy smells, the same wonderful salty sense of freedom.”
He hopes its replacement remains true to itself.
Serge Dedina, former mayor, Imperial Beach
California’s southernmost beach, Imperial Beach, isn’t known for award-winning musical acts like some of its northern counterparts are.
But on July 17, 2016, when the surf was firing and the pier was buzzing with anglers, the community was treated with what its then-mayor recalls as a “magical” surprise.
Grammy-winning San Diego band Switchfoot and local radio station 91X-FM pulled off a last-minute, free concert at the pier.
“I think we had at least 10,000 people,” Serge Dedina says. “We weren’t sure if people were going to show up, because it was advertised really under the radar.”
The show was pulled together quickly in three days with the help of local businesses, the city and the Port of San Diego.
“I started hanging out on the pier in 1971, and I worked on the pier for five years,” said Dedina, himself an avid surfer. “But this was arguably one of the most magical days on the pier in the history of Imperial Beach.”
For Dedina, the event, coupled with the opening of new businesses, marked “the comeback of Imperial Beach.”
Alex Concha, retired executive, San Diego
It was his first time fishing. But as soon as his bait hit the water off the Imperial Beach Pier that day in 1960, Alex Concha recalls, his rod caught something big — too big and too strong for the 9-year-old to reel up himself.
“I thought it was a shark or something equally as large, and I instantly started to scream in excitement, and the adrenaline came rushing in,” he remembers.
His father and older brother rushed over to help. A crowd surrounded them, eager to see the “monster” he’d hooked.
“It turned out to be a 10-pound bonita, a very fast game fish that is known for a lot of fight and speed,” said Concha. He always reflects “on this joyous moment in my life” where he “got hooked” on fishing.
“Our beautiful San Diego coastline should always be blessed with piers, so families can enjoy and make special memories that will last a lifetime,” he added. “Our piers are part of our county’s history and should be part of our future.”
