ON THE ROAD : New Visitors Center Aims to Boost Resort’s Appeal : CHANNEL ISLANDS HARBOR

This lovely patchwork of marinas, with apartment and condo developments packed in around it, is not exactly known as a hub. Yes, more than a thousand boats are docked here, bringing in a heavy weekend crowd and offering locals a decent array of restaurants and shops and yacht clubs.

But it is modest as destination resorts go--the Cunard Line brings no cruise ships in for day shopping, and you don’t typically see a 40-foot ketch just in from Marseilles with bronzed Beautiful People ready to party. It’s also off the beaten path--a traffic-clogged, cross-city traverse from Pacific Coast Highway and miles across pungent kale fields from the Ventura Freeway.

Evidently, none of this matters. The intrepid keep finding their way here.

Until recently, a humble visitors information office was tucked away near Tug’s restaurant. It drew perhaps 10 people a month, hardly worth keeping open. Now a new visitors center is open atop Spudnuts and visible at the junction of Victoria Road and Channel Islands Boulevard. The guest book, in just six weeks of receiving names, is fast becoming a Magellan map of the world, with signatories citing as their home residences Holland, Tokyo, Canada, Brooklyn, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, Switzerland, Australia, New Jersey. Slightly more than half are from California, but almost all with out-of-town addresses.

These people, more than 200 of them a month, don’t arrive here by boat. How it is that the harbor is on their itineraries confounds even the happy harbor lessees who pay for the visitors center. “We’re just in the process of trying to figure that out,” says Susan O’Brien, who heads marketing efforts for the harbor.

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Also under examination are some of the services provided.

A self-guiding computer at the entrance recommends, among other things, dining destinations for visitors. But the person just in from Holland or Tokyo or New Jersey who punches up “Family Dining” will find an anorexic town-by-town listing of some baffling choices:

Simi Valley: Hudson’s Grill (“Flirt with the 50’s!”). No other choices.

Oxnard: Furr’s Family Dining (“All You Can Eat Buffet”). No other choices.

Ventura: Oceanside Snack Bar, within the state beach area and near the Doubletree Hotel (“Only restaurant on the beach”). No other choices.

It turns out this computer was donated to the visitors center by Ventura County, which had configured it for operation at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library near Simi Valley--not that presidential scholars wanted these recommendations, either. In setting it up, the county programmed into the computer only those restaurants willing to pay for a mention. So much for public service.

This will quickly be changed, however, to include “just about everybody, including a listing of community events,” says O’Brien.

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Selectivity won’t be a guide, however, as the best a visitors center can do is provide information--not make qualitative choices. That’s amply clear, already, in the clotted brochure racks here.

If names in a guest book map out a world of itinerants, then the indiscriminate array of promotional materials paints a picture of regional art and commerce in all its forms:

Oxnard Special Events Guide, Rediscover Downtown Oxnard, Discover Camarillo, Olivas Adobe Historical Park, The Country Inn at Calabasas, The Whale’s Tail, Gold Coast Sport Fishing, Guide to County Beaches and Parks, La Dolce Vita Continental Grocery, Channel Islands Harbor Food & Wine Festival Guide, Casa Sirena Marina Resort, The Country Inn at Port Hueneme, Upcoast/Oxnard, Mandalay Beach Resort, Ventura Harbor Village, Gull Wings Children’s Museum, Oxnard Farmers Market, and dozens of others.

Is there a sensible way to cut through this? Is it possible to offer the out-of-towner information that’s useful and rewarding?

The people sponsoring this center are at work on this, as well. Tucked into the brochure racks is a modest flyer that says: “Fishing for something to do? Be a volunteer. The Channel Islands Harbor Visitors Information Center needs enthusiastic volunteers!” The volunteers will greet the travelers, answer questions, seek to help in any way possible to rise above the tide of information that threatens to engulf the next pilgrim.

Not that anyone minds so far.

There is no telling, for example, what Diego Bermudez of Naucalpan, Mexico, sought in his visit to this welcome station last month. But he did evidently find it, and thus penned into the margin of the guest book: “Thank you very much for your help.”

That’s pretty much all a new visitors center can hope for. That, and a few volunteers.