The Catalina Connection : Recreational, Economic Ties to County Have Made It a Special Fair-Weather Friend

On most days, it might as well be Atlantis--invisible from the mainland, swallowed in offshore haze or low clouds, surrounded by an expanse of sea that, to the eyes of someone standing on the Orange County shore and looking southwest, seems to go on all the way to Australia. It is detached from the mainstream, almost otherworldly, a kind of Southern California afterthought. Inlanders have to remind themselves that it’s out there.

But while Santa Catalina Island, Orange County’s nearest western neighbor, may be out of sight much of the time, out of mind it is not. Over the years, the island has become the retreat of choice for thousands of Orange County residents who regularly sail or fly the 26 miles (give or take a few, depending on the destination) in order to breathe clean air, soak up bright sun, swim, dive, hike, fish--in short, to relax in depth.

While part of Los Angeles County, Catalina nevertheless has enduring recreational and economic ties to Orange County that in some cases go back two generations or more, to the days when chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. owned the island, stocked it with a buffalo herd and built himself a magnificent Georgian mansion overlooking Avalon harbor. And in those days, when Newport Beach was beginning to emerge as a yachting center, the yachtsmen’s destination of choice often was Catalina. For Orange County residents, the island became a preferred vacation spot and infected visitors with the sort of island fever that compels frequent return visits. Many formed a lifelong attachment.

Carolyn Olsen is one. A frequent visitor to Catalina since she was 3 years old, Olsen today is married, has grown children and has turned the family’s three-generation love affair with the island into a business. Last year, the Olsen family opened the Garden House Inn, a seven-room, bed-and-breakfast inn on Claressa Street in Avalon.

The post-Victorian structure, built in 1923, was spotted for sale by Carolyn’s son Jon, who was running a landscaping firm on the island. He set to work restoring it, but “halfway through the renovation, he yelled for help and my husband and I became involved,” Olsen said. “Then Jon convinced his sister Cathy to come over and manage the place, and now we’re all here. It used to be that we lived in Newport Beach and vacationed on Catalina. Now we live on Catalina and vacation in Newport Beach.”

The Olsens continue to maintain a home in Newport Beach, as well as their boat, the Norwester, which once belonged to John Wayne. But now they consider themselves residents of Avalon and spend only one week a month on the mainland.

In the summer, Mel and Maxine Morrison spend even less than that, when they become residents of Newport Beach in name only. When the weather warms up, the Morrisons head for the beach like thousands of others. But when they reach the beach, they simply keep going and don’t stop for 26 miles.

For about 100 days each summer, the Morrisons live aboard their cabin cruiser, the Sea Swan, luxuriating in the small-town pace of Catalina. Like many Orange County boat owners who make frequent visits to Avalon, they belong to the Catalina Island Yacht Club and moor their boat near its dock. Maxine estimated that perhaps a third of the club’s membership comes from Orange County.

Avalon, said Mel, may be the last true small town in Southern California.

“In a small community like this,” he said, “people are very friendly and you end up knowing a lot of people. That’s one of the best things. And they can be millionaires or people with 20 bucks in their pockets and they’ll all be equal here. And you see people from Orange County constantly.”

The Morrisons, who run a real estate investment and management firm, said that they have considered buying a condominium on the island, “but we always come back to the preference of being on our boat,” Mel said. “It’s special for us here because we can spend full time on the boat.”

And, said Maxine, “if you get tired of the action in Avalon, you can always go to the back side of the island to Cat Harbor or to Cherry Cove or somewhere else. Also, (Catalina) is kind of like an ‘in’ spot to go now. It used to be kind of corny, say, to buy a T-shirt that said Catalina on it, sort of like getting one from Niagara Falls, but now it’s the big thing. Everybody thinks it’s kind of a neat thing to go to Catalina. I just never get tired of the place.”

In fact, said Mel, “If I asked Maxine if she’d rather go to Europe or Catalina, she’d say Catalina.”

If other yachting types aren’t quite that enthusiastic, it doesn’t show, particularly on summer weekends, when public and private anchorages throughout the island are filled with pleasure craft. Mary Salisbury, an administrative officer for the Avalon Harbor Department, estimated that 50% of the yachts tied up in Avalon harbor at any time are from Orange County. And 3.5 miles west of Avalon, the Balboa Yacht Club leases a private anchorage at a cove known as White’s Landing, and the Newport Harbor Yacht Club operates another anchorage at adjacent Moonstone.

Anchorages toward the northwestern end of the island, at Two Harbors, Cat Harbor and Emerald Bay, among others, are used less frequently by Orange County boat owners over for the weekend, said Doug Bombard, an island native who operates all moorings on the island outside the city of Avalon. Boaters from Long Beach, San Pedro, the South Bay area and Marina del Rey tend to do their weekend sailing to the northwest end of the island, which is closer to their home ports than is Avalon. Orange County yachts on extended trips often sail there, however, Bombard said.

“A lot of people from Newport Beach tend to favor the Avalon atmosphere,” said Harvey Wills, a Newport Beach marine hardware dealer who spent his childhood on Catalina and continues to sail to the island frequently. “But to me, it’s sort of like taking my boat to Disneyland. I like to get away from telephones and feel like I’m on a boat on an island. I try to go every weekend, but sometimes it ends up being every other weekend.”

Wills pointed out that owners of sailing yachts--as opposed to power boats--often prefer to go to Avalon and points just northwest of the city not only for the in-town life style but because “conceivably, you can get there on one tack from Newport Beach.”

While the boat traffic from Orange County is the most visible migration to Catalina, the sea route isn’t the only way to go. A new company called Resort Commuter, the only scheduled airline flying from Orange County to Catalina, makes four weekend flights (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) out of John Wayne Airport with its 18-passenger twin-engine Otter. The one-way fare is $39 ($30 for Catalina residents). The 30-minute flight ends at the hilltop Catalina Airport, where passengers can catch a bus for Avalon or Two Harbors.

Private pilots in Orange County also make the island a frequent destination, often simply for lunch. Each day, dozens of pilots and their passengers, leaving in small planes from Orange County airports, swoop into Catalina to dine on buffalo burgers and other dishes that are served at the Catalina Airport cafe. With a sufficiently speedy plane, some of the pilots can complete the round trip--with lunch--within an hour.

For other Orange County residents, however, nothing less than a home on the island will do. For Joe and Lynn Wylie, their home in Avalon was a logical continuation of Lynn’s long family ties to the island. The Wylies now live in a house that was built by Lynn’s grandfather in 1916.

“My husband was stationed (on Catalina) during World War II as a dental officer,” she said, “and when he retired two years ago, we decided Newport Beach was too busy for us and since we had the house in the family already, we came over here to live.”

The island life can feel isolated “at times, just like it would feel on any island,” Wylie said. “But it’s really dumb to feel that way because you can get in a boat and go over to the mainland any time you want to. I find that the more people I talk to that I know in Orange County, the more people there are who say how lucky we are and how they’d like to move over here.”

Bill and Margaret Sangster, residents of Balboa Peninsula, have what some might consider the best of all worlds: a home in Orange County, a condominium in Avalon and a boat with which to get there.

“We’ve been boaters for years and have gone to Avalon for nearly 30 years,” said Margaret, “and we liked it so much that we thought we’d get a condo for the whole family to use. We get over there every two or three weeks. It’s our home away from home.”

Also, she said, during the wintertime, when the ocean can become rough or stormy, “you don’t want to be on a boat over there, but you can still use your condo. The feeling is that you’re definitely off the mainland. It’s not like going to San Diego, where you see people in all directions.”

And, for simple social interdependence, it probably isn’t like anywhere else in Southern California. Orange County residents who live, work or vacation on Catalina say they find that there is a pervasive “all-in-this-together” attitude of most islanders, a lack of competition they say is unique in their experience.

“When we first opened the place, we just sat and looked at each other and said, ‘What do we do with this?’ ” said Carolyn Olsen of her family’s first few days as proprietors of the Garden House Inn. “But we had such help from other hotel people over here. Whatever we asked them, they’d tell us. The people up at the Inn on Mt. Ada (formerly the William Wrigley Jr. mansion) helped us so much we started calling them ‘mother.’ All the hotel people laugh and say we all sleep around, because we stay at each other’s places to see how things are run. You really couldn’t do that over in the United States of America.”

A slip of the tongue by a newly transplanted island resident? Not at all, said Olsen.

“No,” she said, “that’s what people here call the mainland. We say, ‘Are you going over to the States for the weekend?’ ”