Warm Day No Help to Fishermen

Sol White, a self-described “pier aficionado,” showed up at the Ventura Pier early Thursday afternoon, parked his bicycle and threw out his fishing line.

At first his fiddle stayed shut in its black case. The 59-year-old retired doctor, dressed in jeans with red suspenders, said he only plays if the fish aren’t biting.

But it didn’t take long before White had the shiny wooden instrument to his chin. Soon “Turkey in the Straw” was competing with low-flying gulls screeching their own songs to the wind.

The temperature reached 71 on the Ventura coast by early afternoon, making Thursday one of the warmest days in weeks, but that didn’t mean that fish were biting.

Not far from White, Red Maurer pulled up his crab net, found the chunks of shark and perch bait untouched and then reeled in his fishing pole.

“I’m going home,” the 61-year-old Ventura resident told White in a disgusted tone. “Nothing.”

“Some people think if I play my fiddle, they bite better,” White said. But Maurer, a fleshy old man with a stubbled beard, said he knew when to quit.

“They call me the mayor of the Ventura Pier. I’ve been coming here every day for 49 years,” Maurer said before packing his gear on his bicycle and heading toward land.

There were also a few young people on the landmark 118-year-old pier on the sunny, clear weekday afternoon.

Melody Hook, 20, of Ventura said that she would normally have been “watching soaps” but that she brought her 5-month-old Labrador-boxer mix puppy to see the ocean instead.

“I’m trying to convince her to go in the water, but she’s scared of it,” Hook said.

Truman Brown, 19, of Ventura stood glumly by his fishing pole. The independent contractor said he was whiling away the afternoon because he didn’t have any work that day. And all he’d caught was seaweed.

“I’m sick of this place,” he said suddenly. “Nothing to do.”

The older men didn’t act so impatient. “I remember when we did night fishing down here,” Willie Martinez, 74, said to Larry Luna, a 72-year-old Santa Paula resident he sees there almost every day, “and get bass this big.” He held his hands out a foot apart.

“Don’t see them no more,” Luna said, shaking his head.

“I’m a pier fisherman,” said White, who has lived in many states but now resides in Ventura. “I’ve fished them up and down the West Coast.”

White rated the Ventura Pier as “kind of interesting. You don’t know what to expect. Last week, a bunch of dolphins came up,” he said, waving one arm toward the ocean on one side of the pier. “They played around, and then they finally went out.”