Just Lolling Away Another Day at Hollins Lake

It was a slow-moving day at Hollins Lake and Ross Hendricks sat in a lawn chair, watching his line and waiting for a slow-moving catfish to take the bait.

The unpainted 1932 Ford pickup that Hendricks called his “fishing truck” was parked nearby.

It was a warm August afternoon. Hendricks said the fishing was so slow that he was about to call it a day, head home and watch the Padres on TV. Around the edge of Hollins Lake, other folks watched their fishing poles, waiting for the fish to bite about as anxiously as they waited for time to pass.

Hendricks’ old pickup was out of place near the peaceful lake, just 15 miles from downtown San Diego. Ultra-modern, self-contained recreational vehicles, the mainstay of the Hollins Lake Senior Recreation Facility, are home to retired couples who come here to fish and enjoy the quiet in the “cocktail hour” of their lives.

Hollins Lake used to be just a swamp, an old gravel pit suffocated in tules and cattails, along the San Diego River in Mission Trails Regional Park. Then, in 1976, a senior citizens activist named Mary Hollins persuaded the San Diego City Council to let a group of seniors use the 65-acre swamp. The brush was cleared and the lake was stocked with catfish, bass and other fish. The place was named the Hollins Lake Senior Recreation Facility in the activist’s honor.

Hollins Lake is really three lakes separated by gravel and tall grasses. One hundred spaces for recreation vehicles are sometimes filled on summer weekends. But no one seems to mind the close proximity to their neighbors. Many people say the lake community is like a family.

Like a lot of retired couples, Allene Rasmusson and her husband, Lyle, drive their RV only a few miles from their San Diego home every other month to Hollins Lake for a week or so respite.

Rasmusson said she enjoys the company but is relieved on Mondays when the weekenders move on. “It’s like relatives,” she said. “We’re glad to see them come and glad to see them go.”

“You don’t meet strangers here,” said Maxine Liggins, a state employee from San Diego, who comes with her husband to fish on weekends. “People who camp are a breed apart. You enjoy the same things.”

The ideas of family and community are brought up frequently in conversations about Hollins Lake. It might have something to do with the way lake manager Ken Nesbitt oversees his tiny kingdom.

“These people are my people, and I want them to enjoy it,” Nesbitt said. Nesbitt, 60, visits with the campers and has been known to loan $20 when someone runs short.

Nesbitt first came to Hollins Lake shortly after it opened in 1976. “I came out here and loved the place. I said ‘I want to run this place.’ ” A sheet metal mechanic who retired after he “got banged up twice” working for Convair, Nesbitt offered to serve as a watchman. He worked without pay for 2 1/2 years, clearing the land, building a foot bridge and laying out the campsites. Now, he said, he is paid well.

“This place is my love,” he said. “This was swampland. Everything you see I built myself. As long as we have this place I won’t retire. I’m able to do what I want, when I want, how I want.”

With pluck and imagination, Nesbitt helped make Hollins Lake a place that many people call their home away from home.

The City of San Diego owns the land and allows the lake’s board of directors to oversee the property on a nonprofit basis. The lake has 2,000 dues-paying members, mainly seniors, although it is open to the public. Revenues from membership and daily fees ($3 to fish, $8 for camping overnight) pay for maintenance, stocking the lake with fish and Nesbitt’s salary. But the income doesn’t cover everything.

“I’ve operated this place on donations,” Nesbitt said. “I’ve got a world of friends and a stack of business cards.” Recently he talked a construction company into putting in a new blacktop driveway for $3,600, a job that should have cost about $12,000, he said.

Nesbitt also cut corners by buying old washing machine tubs for every campsite as a way to meet a city ordinance requiring that all fires be contained. With a grill over them, campers say they work just fine for barbecues.

Some campers set up housekeeping and stay awhile. Bill Cline lives at “La Jolla Point,” a corner of the lake he built into an outdoor home. He invites visitors to step into his “living room,” a sand bar which he extended into the lake. Cline added a reed fence, hanging lanterns and some rough furniture. From this “living room” he can watch his fishing pole while entertaining guests. He sleeps inside his nearby RV.

Like every good lake, Hollins Lake has its legend: Leroy the catfish. By some accounts, Leroy is more than 20 pounds and has a mouth full of fishing lures and hooks, left over when Leroy snapped the line, as he always does.

Nesbitt said fishermen will get Leroy up to the bank and “he’ll flip his tail and wave goodby.”

Cline said he had Leroy on his line at La Jolla Point once. “Soon as I got him three or four feet from the bank, he broke my line like a rotten thread.”

Another time a fisherman reeled Leroy in. “This guy took one look at Leroy and the catfish went one way and that fellow went the other,” Cline said.

Like the the ducks and geese that nest here, people come to Hollins Lake in their mobile homes to seek refuge. Visitors talk about the peace and isolation Hollins Lake offers so close to the city.

A new housing development can be seen on the hillside, across Mission Gorge Road to the south. But Hollins Lake and the 4,438 acres of Mission Trails Regional Park are protected as open space by the city.

“San Diego is starting to be like L.A.,” Allene Rasmusson said. “That’s why we’re out here.”

Another camper said, “It’s hard to believe the rat race is just over the hill.”