Memories at the Angler Center
updated: Mar 27, 2012, 11:34 AM
By Boyd Grant
As my sister says "never cry because it's over - just be glad it happened." I have some wonderful memories of my time at the Angler Center and I would just like to share a few of them with you in video form:
The first video is of a group of professional jet skiers showing off their arial acrobatics in the surfline next to the Pier.
The following two video show how wildlife emergencies are handled at Goleta. The first is of an injured sea lion that was found beached and rescued by the Santa Barbara Marine Mammal Center. They always arrived within 30 minutes of our calls.
This one is special to me. The woman with the bird is Kristal Shoger, a foreign exchange student at UCSB from Hamburg, Germany. I had met her and her parents (Hans and Minnie) that day on the Pier where we witnessed a seagull trapped by attached fishing line. The video shows the full rescue and subsequent transport to June Taylor at the Wildlife Care Network and includes a tour of her facilities.
There were many, many hosted fishing activities on the Pier. This group is from the Dunn Middle School in Santa Ynez. Their teacher was Donna Frost (Marsfan) who Mike Spence (Santa) and I met at the Guadalupe Dunes Perch Derby the previous year. Incidentally it was at Guadalupe that I first saw Mike's recycle fishing line boxes and brought them to the attention of UPSAC.
One of the changes that I encouraged at Goleta was to replace the treble gaff, used to obtain mussels off the pilings, with a rope snare. Treble gaffs tend to snag on the pilings and leave gapping holes in the mussel clumps which open them up to seastar predation. The alternative snare technique was first developed by Martin Tait (Greenrag) and is demonstrated here by Martin Carbajal who I watched grow up on the Pier and later become a successful commercial fisherman with his own boat.
And, of course, the inevitable fishing video. This one features my buddy, Pino Casteneda, with a fairly large Calico Bass caught out of the reef.
Just to keep things in perspective ... this is what the Pier used to look like in the mornings following nights of heavy activity. The County, bless their hearts, have now agreed to pressure wash the Pier on a regular and timely basis so that it never looks like this again.
Thank you to UPSAC and all those who supported our efforts at Goleta.
Thanks, Boyd, for all that you did, establishing the Angler Center, and then staffing it so well, not selling gear, but advising people how to fish safely and helping with wildlife. Wish we had something similar on Stearns Wharf.
It sounds as though you are not going to return? That's VERY too bad, if so.
