The swells jostled Doug and Ray’s patrol boat as they surveyed the disaster in front of them. Two fishermen had wedged a sixty-five foot boat in between two boulders and the boat was quickly being torn to pieces. Doug saw two men clinging frantically to the rail, screaming for help.
The area in which the men had wrecked the boat was a morass of jagged rocks. That, and the storm, made it nearly impossible for Doug and Ray to get their patrol boat close enough to rescue the two men. Finally, they spotted a small area of the sea that looked calm enough to draw a little closer, at least long enough to allow them to rescue the desperate men.
“Get us out of here!” one of the men on the doomed boat screamed. “Hurry!”
Doug instructed them to put on their life jackets. “You’re going to need to swim out to us!” Doug called to them. “We can’t get all the way to you.”
“I can’t swim,” one of the men shouted back, frantically.
This is just one of many true stories in Doug Oudin’s fabulous memoir, Between Two Harbors, a book I just finished reading.
Doug and his wife, Maureen, fresh out of college, were looking for a brief adventure and Catalina Island seemed like the ideal place. They thought they might stay a year or so, but it didn’t quite work out that way. What followed was a thirty-two year odyssey with Doug serving as Harbormaster for the Santa Catalina Island Company, as well as vice-president of Harbor Operations for Two Harbors Enterprises.
Before the move, Maureen had been offered a job as a bookkeeper on the island. Doug was hired to do repair work around the harbor. The couple moved in to company housing - a 700 square foot home with a view of the bay - and settled in.
After Doug and Maureen had been on the island for awhile, Doug began taking additional Coast Guard exams and soon was harbormaster with a crew of twenty-eight men and women. Emergency calls woke Doug regularly in the middle of the night and he quickly dressed and headed out to the harbor to deal with sinking ships, broken bones, lacerations from, say, hooking a live shark while fishing, and drownings, including that of Natalie Wood.
But life was sweet. Doug loved his job and he loved the island. He loved fishing (who knew there were so many methods based on what kind of fish you were after?), loved helping people get their boats organized in the harbor, loved the small-town festivals, and loved the wild, quiet, adventurous, remote life he was living. Maureen loved it, also, especially after the birth of their two boys, Trevor and Troy.
The boys could wander safely almost anywhere and they did, along with the other children growing up on the island. They built forts, fished, and found whale bones and unusual shells. Although there was television and internet on the island, the boys gravitated towards the adventures of the island. Buffalo roamed the island, as did goats, wild boar, deer, and other animals. Before a small school was started on their end of the island, Trevor took a bus (and sometimes a boat) to Avalon for classes, a two-hour daily round trip.
Some of Doug’s stories had me on the edge of my seat, biting my fingernails. The family’s personal life wasn’t always easy: water shortages, lack of a decent road system, and isolation. But it was a life they continually chose. And both of their sons grew up and went into marine work. Trevor remained on the island and, along with his wife Lauren, works in the marine university science center, a branch of USC. Troy attended California Maritime Academy and became a marine engineer.
With their sons grown, Maureen longed to be back near her family and to re-experience “civilization”. They now live in Oregon. But Catalina will never be out of Doug’s soul. He goes back often for fishing trips and he’s remained on the Board of the Catalina Island Seabass Fund, a foundation established to help restore the depleted white seabass fishery. “I could have lived there forever,” Doug says, and a part of him, of course, still does.
Doug Oudin wrote a weekly column for the Catalina Islander newspaper for twenty one years. Buy his memoir - Between Two Harbors - from Amazon.
