Last modified: November 20, 2018

Fishing Piers Southern California

Malibu Pier

The description of the pier in the book—“It was thirty miles to Lido on the coast highway, the first ten of them through traffic. Ohls made the run in three quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we skidded to a stop in front of a faded stucco arch and I took my feet out of the floorboards and we got out. A long pier railed with white two-by-fours stretched seaward from the arch. A knot of people leaned out at the far end and a motorcycle officer stood under the arch keeping another group of people from going out on the pier. Cars were parked on both sides of the highway, the usual ghouls, of both sexes. Ohls showed the motorcycle officer his badge and we went out on the pier, into a loud fish smell which one night’s hard rain hadn’t even dented.” Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, 1939

A partial list of movies and TV shows featuring the pier includes: The Big Sleep; Gidget; Devil in a Blue Dress; 711 Ocean Drive; Surf Party; Beach Ball; Back to the Beach; Mr. Jones; Moment by Moment (in Alice’s Restaurant); California Suites (in Alice’s Restaurant); Big Wednesday; Summerland (TV); Rockford Files (TV); Beverly Hills 90210 (TV); Bay Watch (TV).

In Mr. Jones, Richard Gere does a balancing act on the railings for his psychiatrist Lena Olin. Too bad I wasn’t there for the filming.

The pier has also been seen in many, many commercials.

<*}}}}}}}}}>< —  One visit to the pier will convince anyone that there’s a connection between the pier and surfing.

In Huntington and Malibu, they’re shooting the pier… —The Beach Boys, Surfin’ Safari, 1962

Harry Medved in his book Hollywood Escapes says “When the Beach Boys sang about ‘shooting the pier,’ they were immortalizing the daredevil surfers who negotiated the [Malibu Pier] structure’s pilings.”

Malibu Pier is also noted among surfing enthusiasts as the place where Nicolas Rolando Gabaldon died. Gabaldon is famous for being California’s first documented surfer of African-American and Hispanic descent. On June 6, 1951 he crashed into the pilings at Malibu Pier while attempting to “shoot the pier” aka a “pier ride.” Apparently the day contained some of the biggest swells in Malibu history with waves 10 feet high and surfers had come from all over Southern California to surf. Although in a group, and warned to pull out of a ride, he was unsuccessful. While his surfboard was found almost immediately, his body wasn’t located until 3 to 4 days later when it washed up on Las Flores Beach.

Gabaldon (born in 1927) honed his surfing skills while practicing at Inkwell Beach during the Jim Crow Era of the ‘40s. The beach, a 200-foot roped off “for Negroes Only” section of beach was south of the Santa Monica Pier and north of the (now gone) Ocean Park Pier.

<*}}}}}}}}}>< — Wylie’s is my favorite bait shop and without doubt Ginny Wylie is one of my favorite people: a great combination. I once wrote a story about Wylie’s and Ginny for the Fish Taco Chronicle magazine but I think this article is better.

Best Bait Shop: Wylie’s

As the scorched hills over the Pacific Coast Highway still smoldered after the great Malibu fire of 1956, and smoky haze hung over the bay, I remember my father packing me in the car one Saturday and speeding toward the beach to make sure with his own eyes that Wylie’s bait shop had survived the blaze. A half-block north of Topanga Canyon, on the inland side of PCH, Wylie’s stood, to our relief, completely unscathed by the flames.

Almost a half-century later, it looks just about the same: exactly the way a world-class art director would build a bait-shop for a fully authentic big-budget movie. A clapboard rectangle of no more than a few hundred square feet supports a red-tiled roof. A couple of sawed-off pier pilings in front were probably used to tie up horses ridden down by the hill-dwellers above. Inside Wylie’s, the same hardwood plank floor creaks under your heels. Frayed netting and glass floats hanging off the ceiling recall the tiki craze of the Kennedy era. Faded photos of barn-door halibut, bug-eyed rockfish and one or two kayak-size bass are pinned to a wall behind the counter. Green and red scrawlings on a yellowing pane of glass record high and low tides.

If Wylie’s had burned down in 1956, you could have bought monofilament and lead sinkers at the bait shops on the Malibu Pier, at Paradise Cove, at Corral Beach and at Tom Cod’s old place off Washington and Lincoln. Today, Wylie’s is the last fisherman’s store on PCH between Santa Monica and Oxnard. It’s the last standing bait shop, the last place to buy a fishing license, and the last place to buy fresh bait.

Bill and Ruth Wylie opened the tiny store in 1946 as an offshoot of their sporting goods business. And almost immediately, Wylie’s became the go-to place for serious local fishermen. For the next two decades, when the bay still teemed with fish — when you could limit-out on bonito off the Santa Monica Pier, fill two buckets in a short morning with surf perch from the north end of the Venice parking lot, see schools of corbina sucking sand crabs south of Surfrider Beach, and drift for keeper halibut in front of the old Getty — it was Wylie’s who outfitted you.

Most people, myself and my father included, always assumed the gruff, trash-talking, somewhat androgynous guy behind the counter was, in fact, Wylie. Actually, it was Bob Varnum, who ran the store from the early ’60s until he passed away in December of 2000. Bob would bitch and cuss at the slightest provocation. But he’d also take all the time necessary to show you how to tie a surf leader, how to keep fresh bait on a snelled hook, and how to rig for pier fishing. Stopping in to buy a burlap sack of fresh mussels, or a white carton or two of live soft-shell sand-crabs — bait we could just as readily purchase in any other shop — was merely an excuse to spend some time with Bob, catching up on what was biting where and on what.

As urban runoff, PCBs and commercial overfishing of sardines and anchovies strangled the local catch, only Wylie’s survived. As Bob got older and began to falter, his business partner, the original owner’s granddaughter, Ginny Wylie, began to spend more and more time in the shop. Today she runs Wylie’s alone: six days a week, 12 hours a day, living in her grandparents’ makeshift home behind the shop. And it’s no overstatement to say that Ginny is godmother to a loyal legion of surf fishermen, those of us who still wade into the breakers and — using lugworms, rubber grubs, or hand-harvested sand crabs — still battle for perch, croakers and corbina. At her strategic outpost, Ginny’s clientele runs the gamut from gardeners to movie stars. You’re as likely to bump into Cuba Gooding Jr. as a newly arrived immigrant from Michoacán while waiting to pay for hooks and sinkers. Wylie’s continues to be to other tackle shops and sporting goods stores as a Main Street hardware store is to Home Depot.

Unfortunately, the state of California is threatening to wipe out this half-century-old tradition. The patch of PCH that Wylie’s sits on, and extending into the mouth of Topanga Canyon, the last ramshackle, bohemian holdout in Malibu, has recently been acquired by the state. Now earmarked for expansion of Topanga State Park, the residents and businesses — including Wylie’s, the old motel, the noted Reel Inn eatery — all face relocation. Wylie’s wooden bait shop has been declared a historic preservation building, but not the business itself. The relocation contractors that represent the state have already lowballed Ginny, offering a laughably low amount for her residence. And they have failed so far to grant her an acceptable lease-back of the store.

But messing with Ginny Wylie is like taunting a fearless barracuda. She’s refused to settle for any lease that won’t fully guarantee the ongoing operation of the bait shop. “Do they think I’m just going to hand over a 57-year-old business to them?” she said defiantly as I was stocking up on surf leaders the other day. “I would tear this place down myself before letting them take it away.” The state bean counters have handed her a 90-day eviction notice, but no one who knows Wylie thinks this is even remotely the end of the battle. Ginny’s got some formidable attorneys. Captain Ron Baker, host of KMPC’s Fish Talk Radio, has taken up her cause. So has the Topanga Messenger, the local paper. But mostly, Wylie’s has an army: 50 years’ worth of appreciative friends and customers who are not about to let our greatest bait shop get turned into a parking lot. Drop in and see Ginny. She’ll teach you how to fish. 18757 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 456-2321. Marc Cooper, LA Weekly, October 17-23, 2003

<*}}}}}}}}}>< —  Not a place for getting fish? Blasphemous! Transistor radio? An old article.

One of the most pleasant ways to spend a Sunday is to go pier fishing. There are plenty of piers in Southern California, all you have to do is dig a bucket of worms in the garden, unearth the pole from the back porch closet and strike out. The rest of the day is pure pleasure. They sell tackle and bait at most piers so if you hook up on one of the pilings, or if the fish eat all your worms, you are in no great trouble.

Our favorite pier is at Malibu. Parking is a problem and a man comes around a couple of times a day to collect a quarter or so pier fee, but other than that the day at Malibu Pier can pass in quiet contentment. Once we even caught some fish at Malibu, but there is no need to overdo things.

We get down to Malibu early in the morning on a Sunday. Only the regulars have beat us to the place: Tom Cod Annie and Halibut Sam are already on hand with the gunny sacks and folding and enormous lunches. We find a bench and spread out the tackle. We usually knit on a gang hook arrangement to fish for monsters here and if we are lucky we’ll tie into a sardine.

From time to time people catch sand sharks and rays and once in a while they’ll even hook up a crab that was walking across the bottom and blundered afoul of a hook. Once we saw a man who caught a halibut on Malibu Pier but the rumors were that a skin diver had put the halibut on his friend’s line. Malibu Pier is not a place for catching fish. It’s a place for getting sunshine, for enjoying the breeze, for eating (there is a hamburger stand at the end of the pier if you forget to bring your giant lunch) and for watching the surfers…

Once the children’s mother went along and sketched on Malibu Pier. This drew as much of a crowd as the fellow who got a fishhook in his toe and the other fellow who hooked a crab. One fisherman one day brought a guitar with him and I waited all day for guitar music but heard nothing, I think he carried his lunch in the guitar. Many people bring their transistor radios to the pier and the afternoon air is filled with the sound of the Dodger ball game and Vin Scully’s voice. A fishing pier is a good place to listen to a ballgame.

Along about 5 p.m. it is time to put all the tackle away and head for home. Tom Cod Mary has left by now as has Halibut Sam—the regulars usually leave around three. You’ll go home sunburned and rested and convinced that the super market is the best place to buy fresh fish. Russ Leadabrand, Off The Beaten Path, Pasadena Independent, July 20, 1966

History Note. The name Malibu is seemingly derived from the early (1700s) Chumash Indian rancheria Umalibo (although some sources says the original name was Humaliwo which means “the surf sounds loudly”). Later, the area was part of the huge Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit.

The pier was built by Fredrick Hastings Rindge, the man who had bought the Malibu Ranchero in 1891 from Mathew Keller (and for many years the cove was called Keller’s Shelter). Rindge built the first pier on this location in 1905 (although various sources say 1903, 1904 and 1906). Like many of the early piers, it was primarily used as a wharf for a railroad. In this case, it was Rindge’s own railroad—the Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railroad. The railroad operated from Las Flores Canyon to the Ventura County line and was built (at least in part) by Ringe to block the plans of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Southern Pacific wanted to extend its Santa Monica line to Santa Barbara and appeared ready to do so until Rindge discovered he could stop them by building his own railroad.

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