2 Harbors Chart Separate Courses : Development: Channel Islands thrives on a few key leaseholders as the Ventura port tries to recover from floods and legal problems.

Ventura County’s two recreational harbors are seven miles from each other, yet worlds apart.

Both were built in the early 1960s and survive on the merits of their marinas, stores, restaurants and fish docks.

But while the county-owned Channel Islands Harbor built itself smoothly on a few key leaseholders who have been steady since the first day, Ventura Harbor’s growth has been stunted by a devastating flood and legal troubles that it is only beginning to shrug off.

The obstacles have left Ventura Harbor the poorer cousin.

A 1990 study of waterfront retail centers in Southern California showed Ventura Harbor properties were earning more per square foot than Channel Islands Harbor properties. The Ventura properties made sales averaging $132.38 per square foot that year, compared with $107.65 and $127.51 per square foot at two Channel Islands Harbor shopping villages, Fisherman’s Wharf and Harbor Landing, respectively.

But Ventura Harbor is earning far less for its owner, the Ventura Port District, than the county-owned Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, which turns a $2-million annual profit for its landlord, the county Parks and Recreation Department.

The Ventura Harbor claims no real net profit, having poured most of its profits into a standing $3-million fund to keep its bottom dredged because of an ongoing silt problem, said Richard Parsons, the harbor’s general manager.

“The reason we’re struggling more so than Channel Islands is that they have most of their harbor developed,” Parsons said recently. “They don’t have 20-acre parcels sitting vacant. They have several thousand apartment units sitting on land that is equivalent to the land we have sitting vacant.”

Earlier, over broiled fish at a Ventura Harbor restaurant, Parsons had heaved a little sigh.

“We’ve always had a lot more hurdles to overcome than they have,” he said.

Channel Islands Harbor came cheap.

It was chewed out of the coastline by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and opened in 1965 at no cost to the Ventura County government, which runs it.

The corps fashioned the harbor to be a sand trap to control erosion of beaches to the southeast, but the county quickly realized the harbor’s recreational possibilities. The county began leasing land to developers who have built about 3,600 boat slips--and much more.

“The peninsula was nothing but sand dunes down there when we made the lease with the county to build the apartments and the restaurants and hotel,” developer Martin V. Smith said recently. “We paid our rents the first couple of years by putting in the streets and the sewer lines.”

Since then, Smith’s company has built the Fishermen’s Wharf shopping village, a 500-slip marina, several restaurants and the new Ventura County Maritime Museum.

“We’ve been very fortunate in that the county’s been a super landlord,” he said. “They’ve worked with us through our trials.” Other developers have built at the complex, which now covers 310 acres of land and water.

Some said they never dreamed they would be so successful.

Boat captain Jack Ward recalled moving from Malibu in the late 1960s to start a sportfishing operation at Channel Islands Harbor with nothing but a boat and an office trailer on a patch of sand.

Ward said he built his business on avid anglers, who flocked to the Channel Islands Harbor in hopes of hooking the huge schools of black sea bass and white sea bass that coursed through the channel in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now, Ward’s CISCO Sportfishing dock harbors about 20 boats that take thousands of passengers fishing and diving each year in the Santa Barbara Channel. And Ward said he is already planning renovations for the now-idle Dockside restaurant he built nearby.

Ward said he almost settled in Ventura Harbor--until he saw heavy surf smashing the harbor mouth.

He had just finished lunch there with the dock owners, who agreed to lease him a slip.

“We’re standing in front of the restaurant and I see these waves breaking across the entrance,” Ward said. “I said, ‘Does this happen very often here?’ They said, ‘Oh Jack, don’t you worry about it.’ ”

Ward worried.

The same day, he drifted down the coast to Channel Islands Harbor and decided to settle there, where the harbor entrance “was not having any problems whatsoever.” The water is deeper and calmer at Channel Islands Harbor than at Ventura Harbor, which is widely regarded as the most dangerous entrance in all of Southern California.

More than 60 boats have been damaged or destroyed since 1982 in the Ventura Harbor entrance, where the waves sometimes crest at 12 feet. The conditions prevent anyone from entering or leaving the harbor about 110 days a year.

The Army Corps of Engineers is seeking permission from state and federal agencies to make the Ventura Harbor entrance safer by extending the existing breakwaters.

That would reduce the amount of sand being dropped at the harbor mouth and the size of the waves at the harbor mouth.

Ventura Harbor started promisingly enough.

It was conceived by the Ventura City Council in the early 1960s as a recreational port, to be hewn out of 250 acres of swampland at a cost of $4.75 million.

The council set up a public corporation called the Ventura Port District and appointed a five-member board of commissioners to four-year terms, to issue bonds for the harbor’s construction and oversee the project.

While Channel Islands was dug for free by the U.S. government, the Ventura Port District is still paying off bonds for its harbor’s construction, Parsons said.

A huge hole was dug, 15 feet deep. Workers trucked the tons of dirt inland to help build parts of the Ventura and Santa Paula freeways and built massive rock jetties to form the entrance.

A dredge then cut a channel from the ocean to the hole, flooding the new harbor with seawater.

By the late 1960s, boaters who once had to haul their crafts by trailer to launch from Ventura’s beaches occupied nearly 1,900 slips at the harbor.

Then nature crushed it.

On Feb. 25, 1969, heavy rains pushed the Santa Clara River over its banks. A wall of water flooded the river delta and the nearby harbor, smashing most of the boat slips and washing the wreckage of more than 100 boats out to sea.

Through the 1970s, the harbor struggled to rebuild.

In 1980, it clinched a deal with Ocean Services Corp., which promised to build a shopping village and special tourist attractions, including an aquarium.

At last Ventura Harbor seemed poised to catch up with the steady development at Channel Islands Harbor.

Then, in 1987, Ocean Services filed for bankruptcy.

The aquarium was never built, the village still wasn’t finished and a flurry of lawsuits ensued among harbor officials, Ocean Services and the tenants of Ventura Harbor Village.

The harbor seemed to spend the next five years reeling from the blow, as banks foreclosed on the loans that built the village and merchants complained that the bankers were absentee landlords who cared little about the harbor’s prosperity.

Negotiations to sell part of the village to a Denver-area hog farmer fell through last spring.

Then, in May, the harbor truly began to recover when new management took over, officials there said.

In March, the Ventura Port District borrowed enough money to buy half the village. Now it is negotiating to buy the other half from Great Western Bank in hopes that the whole harbor will do better under unified management and attract more tourism, Parsons said.

“Now we know we’re going to be here for a while,” Parsons said.

Merchants say they are happier working with the new Ventura Harbor Public Facilities Corp., the firm set up to run the harbor’s holdings.

Tom Rush, president of the Ventura Harbor Village Merchants Assn., pointed to a new concert stage built at the harbor, where the merchants hope to present live music every weekend through the summer.

“I think the main thing is a positive attitude,” Rush said as tourists pedaled around the Ventura Harbor in bright yellow paddle boats rented from his dock. “We’re going to improve.”

Despite the troubles and the dangerous harbor mouth, many professional boat operators prefer Ventura Harbor.

Ted Crombie considered Channel Islands Harbor but settled in Ventura, where dock fees were cheaper for his scuba diver support boat, the Leo III.

“I figured if I was gonna get robbed, I might as well get robbed at my speed,” he said of mooring fees at Ventura Harbor, which for him are about 15% less than at Channel Islands Harbor.

Besides, he said, Ventura Harbor is friendlier.

“The people that are down here, it’s like a big family,” Crombie said. “I’ve had other dive boats send me customers, and I’ve sent them some. At Channel Islands, it just doesn’t work that way.”

Walk-on business was poor at Channel Islands Harbor, said John Hardman, who moved his cruise boat, the Freya, out of the Oxnard harbor two years ago.

Because the place is spread out over three spits of land, tourists have to drive from one business to another. At Ventura Harbor, they can walk among most of the docks, restaurants and shops, which are clustered around a central basin.

Ventura Harbor also is better equipped to serve commercial fishermen, with a bustling dock and a high-capacity icehouse. About 100 commercial fishermen use Ventura as a base to fish for rock cod, squid and sea urchins, compared with only 70 or so urchin fishermen at Channel Islands Harbor, said Brian Jenison, president of the Ventura County Fishermen’s Assn.

Channel Islands Harbor has only a pair of lifts for unloading fish, and ice must be trucked in from elsewhere. Ventura Harbor, on the other hand, has three fish lifts, an icehouse and three on-site fish buyers.

“I know half a dozen fishermen who have relocated to Ventura Harbor,” Jenison said. “I would encourage the county to go ahead and get into the ice business. We are a captive audience. I think it’s unfair that the fishermen have to do it the old-style way of trucking it back and forth.”

Yet for all their differences, the two harbors face common challenges: gray weather, the recession, distance from the population centers of Ventura and Oxnard-- and plain ignorance.

“Our motto still stands: ‘If you can find us, you’ll love us,”’ said Smith, one of Channel Islands’ developers. “It’s still not an easy place to find.”

“There’s a lot of people in the county that don’t even realize it’s here,” said Channel Islands harbor master Frank Anderson.

Ventura Harbor suffers from the same malady, said Parsons, its general manager.

Small signs point motorists from the Ventura Freeway to the harbor, mentioning only the Channel Islands National Park’s visitors center, which accommodates about 170,000 visitors a year.

When tourists exit at Victoria Avenue, there is no sign pointing west toward the harbor at Olivas Park Drive, only a large sign for Channel Islands Harbor that directs them to keep going south on Victoria, Parsons noted.

Both administrators said their facilities often get visitors who became lost on the way to “the other harbor.”

Anderson said, “It’s almost like being on the moon to a lot of people, to make that jump, to come nine miles off the freeway.”

As both harbors plan to push city and county governments for better signs, they are looking to the future with dreams of becoming as big as the more successful harbors in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.

“My prediction is that Ventura Harbor is a good five or six years away from getting the status Channel Islands (Harbor) has right now,” said Robert Jaramillo, manager of Reuben’s Restaurant at Channel Islands Harbor, where he has worked for nearly 10 years.

He added with a smile, “And Channel Islands is a good five or six years away from getting the status of Marina del Rey.”