BIYC MEMORIES FROM 1933 SEC | TREAS JUNE MURPHY HAWKINS​

From 1924 on, we spent the summertime in Balboa first renting a house while ours was built. My father bought a lot at 546 S. Bay front on Balboa Island. We first rented a house at 133 Pearl for the first three summers. The pier was built in 1927 and we moved into the house in 1928. It had 6 bedrooms upstairs. 

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We called that house the “Hurricane deck” because there was always something going on. We had our friends visit often. Our pier in front was the meeting place for all the sporting events for the BIYC: swimming, sailing, paddle boarding, rowing, diving, and canoeing. Mother ran the show most of the time. I had a regular group of girlfriends. They called us the “howling” mob. They came from several different cities in So. California. Their families had summer cottages on the island. Very few people lived there all year. I don’t think anyone had heat in their homes. We sailed a 12- foot wooden hulled cat boat called Snowbirds. Ours was number 10 and called Shenanigan. They were easy and safe to sail. We went all over the bay, often getting stuck on the sandbars and mud flats. At times we went to Harbor Island for picnics and a swim “a la nude.” There were no houses on that island then. Other times we sailed to the entrance of the bay and had a picnic at China Cove. It wasn’t named that then. The entrance to the harbor was crooked due to the many sand bars.  If we wanted to get out to the ocean, we had to watch the tides and never were allowed out without two or three boats together.  

 

I was brother Bill’s crew for races most of the time. On weekends we sailed at the Southland Sailing Club now the Balboa Yacht Club and also the Newport Harbor Yacht Club. We would always do fairly well, but seldom first place. 

 

My father always insisted that we were able to swim well. We had to swim across the bay from J.A. Beek’s pier to the pavilion, usually on Sundays when my father would be down for the weekend and the water was calm. 

 

On special occasions we went to Emerald Bay for picnics. We went with neighborhood kids.  We would body surf in from our boats anchored out beyond the waves.  We explored the tide pools and used plow holds of kelp for our anchor.  Once we explored an old movie set of a Venice village built around 1924 for a movie. There were no houses, just a beautiful empty beach.  We either went by cars or boats.  Father bought a 41’ wooden hull sloop from his brother (Hayes Murphy) in Connecticut. He had it shipped on a freighter through the Panama Canal into LA harbor.   It was a slow, seaworthy boat.  On it we would anchor and swim to shore at various beaches along the So. California coast.  

 

Our time with the Balboa Island Yacht Club was busy. Mr. Beek organized trips to Catalina Island. We went there on weekends.  There were usually three or four boats, and his favorite cove was 4th of July Harbor. We also went to San Clemente Island a couple of times.  It was a barren island with little round cacti that were hard to see, but easy to pick up thorns through our tennis shoes.  Ouch!  Santa Cruz Island was our favorite.  We hoped to get there once every summer and see the fresh waterfall and the painted caves.  I attended several regattas in Long Beach and Santa Barbara, but I was too young to do much else.  I crewed for my brother Bill on the Snowbird in both harbors seemed very large.