He Is Anglers’ History Lesson : Hollingsworth Traces California Fishing Back Into the 1800s

You walk into Lynn Hollingsworth’s trailer and you journey back in time. Hollingsworth is already there to greet you. His hands are busy restoring one of the first “candy bar” lures ever built. Plastered on his walls and filling his files are an entire history of sportfishing in California.

Hollingsworth has been on a mission of sorts for the last 15 years: Collecting as much of sportfishing’s past as possible for a book on the subject, which he says is long overdue.

“When you talk about the history of California, then you got to include sportfishing,” the Gardena resident says, “because it is part of it and it always will be.”

And a good part of that history is stashed within the confines of Hollingsworth’s tiny trailer. More than 500 fishing reels dating to the late 1800s fill glass cabinets. He has restored and stored rods that span six decades, including one owned by Zeppo Marx.

But what Hollingsworth is really after are old photographs and memorabilia that depict the way things once were along the California coast--and he has acquired plenty. To the former skipper, the lore of sportfishing is a driving force.

Hollingsworth, 56, spends hours sifting through items he has collected, painstakingly trying to verify names and dates. “I’ve got probably 3,000 to 4,000 photographs,” he says, adding that he can be reached at (213) 324-2347 should anyone want to add to his collection.

Hollingsworth’s pages are full of photographs taken when fish were plentiful and fishermen wore charcoal-gray suits and bow ties.

Ships that waged war against German U-Boats in World War I were later outfitted as barges, setting the stage for other battles, between fish and fishermen. Hollingsworth has hundreds of pictures of men awaiting such battles.

He points to a photograph of the ship Georgina, placed in South Bay waters as a barge in the late 1920s, and singles out a man fishing alone from a platform high on the bow.

“There’s my uncle right there, sitting on what they call a jewfish platform,” Hollingsworth says, explaining that the bow platform was used by fishermen seeking the seabass-like fish. “That’s where the guys that wanted to go out and catch jewfish went, because you’d hook one of these things and it’d be in everybody’s way--you might be up there for hours.”

Hollingsworth points to the Saamar, another vessel-turned-barge on which “Mutiny on the Bounty” was filmed. Fishermen wearing mustaches and fancy apparel are immortalized as they dangle lines off a platform extending from the Catalina-based ship.

Hollingsworth also has pictures of the famous Star of Scotland and the run-down Star of Malibu, as well as the Iwo Jima, the Varga and the Buccaneer.

He points to a photograph of a barge off the Manhattan Beach Pier, taken sometime in the 1930s. Its deck is littered with fish.

“Hell, these are barracoots, big rascals. There’s some yellowfeets in there and God only knows what all,” he says in an old fisherman’s slang. Barracuda were the highly prized gamefish of the day in South Bay waters. Yellowtail were plentiful as well.

Hollingsworth opens one of dozens of photo albums and flips pages full of black-and-white images of fishermen, fish, boats, landings, piers and barges--all from before 1963--and stops when he reaches the Polaris, the first of a fleet started by Bill Poole, famous in the industry as a pioneer of modern long-range sportfishing.

“If it was in the water today, you couldn’t buy a ticket,” Hollingsworth says of the boat’s popularity. “You would have to shoot somebody to steal a ticket. It probably, in its day, was the most popular boat there ever was . . . bar none. You would have to fight to get on that boat.”

Hollingsworth fought his way onto the Polaris often enough to learn why it was so popular. Poole and his crew had an uncanny ability to find big fish.

“I was on Bill Poole’s boat one time and we caught five albacore,” he recalls. “I caught two of the five and not one of them I had was in contention on the jackpot, and mine were well over 40 pounds.

“We pulled in on another stop to fish, and Bill kicked the boat in the butt and told the deckhand to forget it. We didn’t have any tackle on there big enough to handle it. I know there was 100-pound albacore in that thing.”

The Polaris, according to Hollingsworth, sank somewhere off the Baja coast, but its name still is on a few of the most modern sportfishers today.

Hollingsworth, meanwhile, revels in the past, thus keeping it alive for interested generations of the future.

They will learn that the Santa Barbara Special is still carrying passengers, as the Redondo Special. The America, which has bounced from landing to landing, was renamed the Grande. The San Pedro Special is now the Island Fox in Oxnard. Hollingsworth has pictures of all the vessels throughout their evolution.

“Anything prior to 1963, if a boat operated out of that landing, I have that in there,” he says, pointing to his albums. “I have every boat, landing, pier, barge and operator there was prior to 1963 in those books.”

He has one of the Sierra, owned by Tom Endo and run from Whites Point off Palos Verdes. Endo, of Japanese descent, was forced out of business soon after World War II began.

He has, stuck between pages, pictures of landings that have come and gone, those that have grown and those that have moved. There was the small one at the foot of Broadway in San Diego, which became H&M; Landing in the mid-1930s. Hollingsworth has an original flyer, advertising, “Boats for charter,” aboard the Mascot No. 2, on which many a marlin--called marlin swordfish then--was caught.

Hollingsworth has, immortalized on paper, the Jan Kay as it is tied up at Talbot Street before it became Point Loma Sportfishing, and Long Beach’s once-famous Pierpoint Landing, where in 1950 the Spitfire advertised for men only “because there were no facilities for women,” according to Hollingsworth.

Pierpoint and its 1966 price of $200 for a 15-person charter is a thing of the past. Captain Olsen’s Live Bait Boats in Santa Monica, and its late-1930 $2 admission for an all-day boat, has gone by the wayside. The Polaris went down and took with it an $8 price tag for a trip to the Coronado Islands.

They are all history, according to Lynn Hollingsworth.