For Young Men, a Ferry-Tale Job

It’s a sailor’s dream: crossing the channel in Newport Beach, seeing the sails, the palm trees, the sunlit cottages. Breezes rake the harbor. Long afternoons blossom into glorious orange dusks.

Young women come aboard by the boatload all day and all evening long. Every five minutes it’s another batch. They parade down the chipped wood ramps in halter tops and bikinis tight as cling wrap.

They ride the ferries to Balboa Island and back. They hang around and flirt. Any fast-talking ferry worker can collect a phone number or get invited to one of the many parties along the boardwalk.

“It’s just the ultimate summer job,” says Charlie Cotton, 21, who is collecting fares for his second summer.

Driver Jim Cook, 28, says he vows every year to find a new job, but here he is. “There might be something bigger,” he allows, “but I don’t think there’s better.”

The mostly part-time drivers and collectors for the historic Balboa Island ferry enjoy their own fraternity. The hours they’re not working the 65-foot boats, hauling cars and passengers across the main harbor channel, they’re surfing and relishing summer life in one of America’s best beach towns. It is so excruciatingly pleasant that the biggest problem is the monotony.

But for that and the low wages, people like Rick Harlow might stay on forever. Harlow lasted 14 years. He was a shy kid, only 16, when he lucked into the job.

The ferry transformed him. He met girls, girls, girls. He’d need four hands to count all the women he dated. “We had the lifeguards beat tenfold,” he recalls.

The boat runs only 900 feet, connecting the airy shops and beach houses of Balboa Island with those of Balboa Peninsula. It is the last ferry in Southern California, but it is anything but a sleepy relic. Boats run around the clock during summer and never stop before midnight, even during the off-season.

Although a short bridge connects the north side of Balboa Island to the mainland, much of the sizable peninsula population prefers to get there by boat. Ferries embark from the Ferris wheel at the Fun Zone, near Balboa Pier, and land at a dock on the island’s southwest flank.

Demand is so swollen by summer vacationers that three boats operate during peak hours. Each carries up to three cars and 75 pedestrians.

“We haul a couple million passengers a year,” says Seymour Beek, 67, who has run the family-owned business since his father’s death in 1968.

The first boat started running in 1909, when Newport Beach was nothing but an isolated resort connected by Red Car trains to Long Beach. The fleet consisted of a single outboard, and the service was so erratic, Beek says, that the city intervened. Beek’s father, Joseph, was awarded the concession, largely because he was the only bidder with a boat.

Joe Beek sold real estate on Balboa Island. Bay lots at the time went for $300, but the market tanked so badly in the early 1920s that landowners walked away for the price of back taxes--$16 or $17. Today, that wouldn’t buy a doorknob on one of the multimillion-dollar homes. In spite of that, the island retains its small-town feel.

“If you don’t like a lot of social contact, you shouldn’t live on Balboa Island,” Seymour Beek says from his tiny office adjoining the ferry dock. “I cannot walk from here to home--two blocks--without seeing someone I know.”

His ferry workers like to call themselves “masters of the three-minute conversation.” For whatever reasons, Beek says, few women apply for jobs on the boats. He can’t recall ever turning one down, but the current staff is all male.

Will Cotton wangled a job through family connections. He is Charlie Cotton’s 16-year-old brother. Their father was a ferry hand 30 years ago.

“It’s awesome,” Will Cotton says. While he wears shorts and sunscreen to work, his high school friends are peons at stores and restaurants--among the thousands of teens stacking CDs, hosing off dishes and taking out the trash. “They’re pretty jealous,” he says.

Every so often, a guy drives off the end of a boat or piles up a motorcycle trying to board. “One guy tried to do an Evel Knievel . . . jump from the dock to the boat . . . and didn’t make it,” Beek recalls. “We had to get a crane down here to fish the motorcycle out of the bay.”

But such inanities are rare. Ferry veterans concede that boredom can set in. Dumb tourist questions can grow as old as last week’s pizza. Driver Drew Lorentzen recites a list in rapid succession: “ ‘Is this the boat to Catalina?’ ‘Is this on a track?’ ‘Do we have to pay?’ ‘Where’s the beach?’

“They’re dead serious,” he says. “I could go on and on. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. It’s just a great job.”

Fares aren’t much--$1.25 for a car and driver, 50 cents for walk-ons. The 25-ton, 100-horsepower diesel boats are highly maneuverable and fully reversible, with a rudder on each end. The tiny pilothouse contains a wheel for each direction. Red rails raise and lower like drawbridges to allow cars aboard.

It takes a special license to operate the boat. The most difficult part of the job is threading the ferry through the harbor traffic on holidays. “A lot of the casual boaters, they don’t pay attention,” says Lorentzen, 25. “They just cut you off.”

The task is tougher during heavy tides. But those who master it--the boat, the tides, the tourists--look back with fondness on their time at the helm.

“When the tide was ripping out, man, you’d have to head for the upstream dock finger like you were going to plow right into it,” says Harlow, who quit in 1991 to be a landscape contractor. “It was like landing perpendicular to a raging river. You’d have to come in and spin the wheel and lurch right in. I still have dreams about doing that. I have dreams about driving that boat in a heavy current.”