Venice Fishing Pier

Numero Uno —  Rojas is 56-year-old Rogelio Muñoz, a big-shouldered, round-bellied native of Zacatecas, Mexico, who’s lived in L.A. for two decades. Everyone calls him Rojas, and he’s the unofficial boss of the Venice Fishing Pier. On the weekends, he is the first to arrive at the gate. If the guard is a minute late, Rojas bangs on the gate’s bars, and because he is the boss, the gate quickly swings open. Often joined by his three nephews, Rojas lords over the 120-foot-diameter circular end of the pier, with his five rods spread widely along the railing. He is a serious, determined fisherman and is almost always busy: dispensing advice, barking orders, tying leaders for his nephews or for the other Mexican fishermen who bow to his expertise, all the while eyeing his lines with the frowning intensity of a football coach, spitting sunflower seeds to the sea.

He can be magnificently productive. “One day,” a fellow fisherman boasted, “I saw him catch nine sharks.” At times, usually in the afternoons when the action is slow, he naps on the concrete, lying flat on his back; he is almost never disturbed. If he is, it is only because someone has caught a big fish, and the boss likes to inspect any big fish.

When I first encountered him, he was hoisting up a sand shark, snagging it with a heavy treble hook attached to a foot of chain and a length of cotton rope, and raising it past the mussel-encrusted pilings. A crowd gathered around him as he slapped the shark onto the concrete, wrestled it still, and fetched a tape measure from his pocket. “Cuarenta y cuatro,” he announced—44 inches. Onlookers and passing joggers watched with expressions of distaste. The natural world can seem startlingly alien to Los Angelenos.

Once the inevitable photo was snapped, Rojas dragged the shark across the concrete to a shady strip beside the pier rail, where it would remain throughout the long day. One of the curiosities of the Venice Pier is that hardly anyone seems to bring coolers. Fish to be kept are unhooked and then dropped, unceremoniously, on the shadowed concrete beside the rail. You can’t spark a conversation by asking a fisherman about the day’s action; the answer lies gasping at his feet.

“The funny thing about Rojas,” another angler confided to me, “is that he doesn’t even like to eat fish.” Catch-and-release is only rarely practiced in Venice. The Koreans, who congregate mid-pier, carry their fish home to fry with hot pepper threads or to chop into soup; the Russians, who mix—sometimes uncomfortably—with Rojas’ crew at the pier end, salt the sardines they get to be dried on a roof on a hot, sunshiny day; and the Mexicans often cook their catches right on the pier. For those who don’t fish for keeps, or for those whose haul exceeds the limits of their bellies, an old, dumpling-faced Russian woman in a babushka takes up the slack. Every other day or so, at 3 p.m., she wanders from fisherman to fisherman offering $3, and always $3, for a herring, surfperch, or white croaker. Her money is invariably refused by the regulars—even the homeless fishermen wave it away as they hand over one of these—or if she’s lucky, a mackerel or halibut.

The Dark Side —  For the most part, the Venice Pier is like that—laid-back, generous, grimy but good-hearted—though sometimes, after dark, and especially when it’s crowded, things are not so mellow. Venice, which closes at midnight, is one of the few L.A. piers that isn’t open 24 hours a day, allegedly due to a not-so-recent shooting in the parking lot. Several years back, up the coast on the Newport Beach Pier, a 60-year-old fisherman tangled lines with an 18-year-old, and when the younger man cut the other’s line, a fight broke out. After some shouting, and after each man had thrown the other’s rod over the pier railing, the older man pulled a knife and started swinging. When the younger man disarmed him and tossed the knife to the sea, the older man grabbed someone else’s fishing rod and started lunging with that. “At some point,” the police later said, “they ran out of weapons.”

Crossed lines can sour the camaraderie in Venice as elsewhere, but ethnic differences can also chafe. One afternoon I watched a Mexican man strike up a conversation with a pair of old Armenians on the subject of tomatoes, which the Armenians were eating like apples. When the old men exchanged words in Armenian, the Mexican narrowed his eyes, huffed, and said, “I don’t know what you said but it was about me so I’m gonna walk away.” The old men shrugged lazily to one another and returned to their tomatoes.

Party Time —  Differences melt away, however, when the fishing is good—when the devil, as Stephen Penn might put it, is looking the other way. “In the busy time,” a fisherman named John Halimi told me, “you’ll see 10 fish coming up per minute.” Another Venice angler put it this way: “Sometimes it’s like flipping a switch. And then—then it’s a party.” Passing schools of bonito can flip that switch, and when they show up, the Venice Pier all but explodes. So too with mackerel—a “mac attack,” not an uncommon experience, is the stuff of pier fishermen’s dreams. Halibut, however, are by far the most prized fish here, and a number of fishermen focus solely on them, slowly dragging a live anchovy along the bottom and waiting for the halibut’s soft-mouthed strike—hoping like hell they’ll nab a “barn door,” slang for an ultrarare (around piers, anyway) jumbo halibut clocking in at 30-plus pounds.

Ken Jones, in his encyclopedic-and-then-some guidebook, Pier Fishing in California, determined that the all-time California pier-fishing record belongs to a man named R.A. Hendricks, who caught a 453-pound black sea bass from Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara in 1925. After a two-hour battle, Hendricks leaped into a rowboat alongside the wharf and dispatched the mammoth fish with a .22 rifle. A sepia-colored rumor has it that a 600-pound sea bass was caught in 1929 at the Manhattan Beach Pier, a few miles south of Venice, but Jones has never been able to verify it. “The old-timers say it used to be like that,” an angler named Greg Wolthausen told me. “They say there used to be so many fish here that if you jumped off the pier you’d break your neck on them.”

Talk like that—about old-timers, legendary fish, the theory and practice of using a Lucky Lura for jack mackerel, etc.—can almost make you forget where you’re standing. A brief glance behind you, however, and you’re instantly reminded: This is L.A., baby. The beaches are thronged with sunbathers, and aspiring starlets brown themselves in the sun.

Yet life on the pier seems removed from all that, as if L.A. stops at the water’s edge and another, truer world begins. It’s a world familiar to anyone who fishes, and while the fishermen of the Venice Pier may differ from their counterparts on, say, a trout stream, or their more ambitious brethren out trolling in the blue water, they sound much the same when they talk about their fishing. “You know,” John Halimi told me, as he punctured a sardine with a No. 2 hook and then cast it out toward the horizon, “I can either stay home and watch TV, or I can come out here. And when I come out here, whether I catch a big fish or a little fish or no fish at all, I feel the same. I feel better.”

—Jonathan Miles, Field & Stream, May 2005

History Note. Although the most famous pier in Venice was Abbot Kinney’s original Venice Pleasure Pier, the life of that pier ended in 1946. That pier and the other pleasure piers that had made Venice and Ocean Park the Coney Island of the West were all at an end by the mid 60s. The result was a change to the area, some saying for the better, some saying for the worse. There was no disagreement on the issue of fishing since the previous piers had provided recreation access that was no longer available.

Eventually sentiment and consensus for a fishing pier emerged and luckily it coincided with conditions in Sacramento conducive for a pier. The Wildlife Conservation Board’s program for piers had begun in 1959 and by 1963 money to build or reconstruct nine piers had occurred. The Venice fishing pier would be next.

The new pier would cost approximately $890,000 and be financed jointly by the California Wildlife Conservation Board and the Los Angeles City Recreation Department.

In March of 1964 construction began on the new pier and less than a year later the new Venice Fishing Pier emerged. The grand opening was on Saturday, February 27, 1965 and dignitaries included California Gov. Edmund G. Brown, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, members of the Wildlife Conservation Board, and assorted other county and city officials. The Venice High School orchestra provided music and everyone reported having a good time.

The pier itself was built entirely of concrete and reached 1,310 feet out into the Pacific where it ended with a circular end 120 feet in diameter. It was 16 feet wide and came equipped with individual fishing stations that extended out from each side of the pier at 84-foot intervals. Each station contained benches and lights and the pier included a fish-cleaning platform and restrooms. Apparently the pier was popular as an estimated 10,000 anglers used the pier that weekend. The pier quickly became a destination for local anglers and most days would see anglers happily heading out to the pier; life was good.

However, the good life would change in the early 80s when Venice became yet another of the piers that were damaged by ferocious El Niño storms. In 1985 the pier was closed and remained closed for more than a decade. Although Los Angeles officials had originally predicted that it could be reopened by 1993, they were wrong! And though money was finally funded to repair the damage it was found that the structure itself was unsafe. The following story describes the situation well:

Tide Running Against Old Venice Pier

Plain as a hunk of concrete can be, the Venice Pier has always lacked the flair of its wooden, turn-of-the-century predecessor, which offered such eye-catchers as the Giant Dipper Roller Coaster, the Bamboo Dragon Slide and the galleon-shaped Ship Cafe. Didn’t actress Sarah Bernhardt once personally compliment the Ship’s chef on his ragout of spring lamb? The Divine Sarah would have been hard-pressed to find that dish at the modern-day pier’s hamburger stand.

In fact, before the 1,200-foot-long structure was closed for safety reasons 15 months ago, its biggest attractions were a video arcade and a couple of pay telescopes—much to the surprise of tourists expecting a taste of offbeat Venice.       “They’d come out here and think they were going to see the guy juggling chain saws or something,” recalled lifeguard Jon Moryl. “They didn’t realize this was another side of Venice.”

What this side was, in the words of resident Frank Maddocks, was a “place where a family could bring the kids out, catch some fish and spend the whole day. It was a place where senior citizens could chat and look at the view.”

No more. Closed after the discovery that chipping concrete was falling from its base, the 23-year-old fishing pier has been targeted for demolition by the city Department of Recreation and Parks.

Maddocks heads a group—Pier Pressure—trying to save the spot. The county Department of Beaches and Harbors, which formerly operated the pier, turned it back to the city last October because, spokesman Larry Charness said, “The revenues were minimal and the liabilities tremendous.” One daunting factor was the $3.26-million settlement paid by the county last year to a jogger struck and paralyzed by a 150-pound chunk of concrete that fell from the 68-year-old Manhattan Beach Pier. While the cracked portions of the structure had to be wrapped in chain-link fencing and adjacent stretches of sand were fenced off, the Manhattan Beach Pier remains open.

The Venice Pier was similarly wrapped, but Joel Breitbart of Recreation and Parks said engineers have concluded that “nothing we can do would make it structurally sound, regardless of how much money we spent.” Demolition doesn’t come cheap. It’s listed as a $500,000 item in the department’s capital improvements budget proposal.