Bait Shack Ties a Harbor to Its Past

There are many people who believe Orange County is nothing more than a testament to concrete and stucco.

But at Dana Point Harbor, a bait shop housed in the same tiny shack that once graced the old pier -- before they put the breakwater in -- gives a glimpse of another kind of county.

From the outside, it doesn’t look like much. Pier Concessions is so small that motorists can easily miss it. It was once owned by the late R.E. “Reb” Bridgham, a distinguished-looking man who opened the bait and sandwich shop in 1958.

In those days, the fishing was great. Nearby kelp beds attracted halibut, bass and other fish and helped keep Bridgham busy catering to fishermen.

On weekends, the pier was a place to watch surfers riding the point, known as “Killer Dana,” arguably one of California’s prime surfing areas until the government’s decision to build the massive breakwater in the late 1960s.

Using rock from Santa Catalina Island, Vista and Riverside, cranes slowly built the long rows of riprap that protect Doheny Beach and Dana Point Harbor, which includes nearly 2,500 boat slips.

For surfers, progress meant the loss of their spot.

But the decision was a boon to boaters and to the county, which owns the revenue-producing marina.

The bait shop has changed hands over the years and is now owned by Paula Hops, who has made hundreds of friends among the fishermen and others who visit the pier to enjoy the air and views of the placid harbor waters, mewing gulls and passing yachts.

Except the shop’s not at the end of the pier anymore. During a major reconstruction about a dozen years ago, the pier was shortened and the shop was moved to the west end of the harbor. Inside, Hops keeps old photographs on one wall, many of them of surfing.

One picture was taken from atop the bluff overlooking the area before the marina was built.

It shows the old pier and bait shop with no parking lots, restaurants or breakwater.

The shop is so small that customers don’t go inside. They order ice cream, snacks, sodas and bait amid a salty pier ambience, talking to Hops through a window.

If she likes you -- as she does “Kirk,” a homeless man -- she may put things down, go outside and sit at a table and talk. Kirk said he and other patrons consider Hops “a jewel; just a real nice lady.”The tall ship Pilgrim II, a replica of the brig on which seaman and author Richard Henry Dana visited this coast more than 150 years ago, is moored a few yards away.

Today’s harbor is a 212-acre marina rimmed by shops and restaurants. Nearby is the Ocean Institute, an educational facility that helps children and adults explore the ocean environment.

It’s a far cry from when Bridgham ran the shop or, for that matter, from the “silence and solitariness” described in “Two Years Before the Mast,” written by Dana after he visited this point of land aboard the original Pilgrim.

He wrote:

“There was a grandeur in everything around, which almost gave a solemnity to the scene; a silence and solitariness which affected everything. Not a human being but ourselves for miles; and no sound heard but the pulsations of the great Pacific.”

Silence was something Bridgham knew about when he operated the bait shop. But he also knew the area would grow up around him.

“Pretty soon, I’ll be just a little tadpole in a very big pond,” he once said in an interview.

The longevity of his bait shop, however, has secured his spot in county history.