Between Two Harbors: Reflections of a Catalina Island Harbormaster

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For those who know and love Catalina Island – and those who have always wanted to visit – Between Two Harbors reveals a glimpse of what life on the island is really like.

Boasting 86,000 square miles of unspoiled and undeveloped natural beauty, Catalina is an island paradise with wild animals, surrounded by an ocean teeming with fish. For 32 years, Charles Douglas “Doug” Oudin lived a fantasy life on this secluded oasis. As the former harbormaster, he saw it all: harrowing storms, dramatic ocean rescues, traumatic accidents, and the tragic death of actress Natalie Wood.

2 reviews for Between Two Harbors: Reflections of a Catalina Island Harbormaster

  1. wxdunn

    Doug Oudin’s Reflections of a Catalina Island Harbormaster was a great read. He brought back many memories of my boating years at Catalina. I enjoyed learning the inner workings of Two Harbors and remembering the many wonder people I had met over the years. The help from the harbor patrol in the coves was always something that I could count on.
    I recommend this book to everyone.

  2. wxdunn

    Whether you’re a blue water cruiser, armchair sailor, or weekend voyager, like me, stories of the sea captured your imagination at some point and inspired your own adventures. Adventures in Paradise, Sea Hunt, and the life of a game warden and his family and the adventures of Flipper the dolphin, were my first windows to a life on the sea, as a kid growing up in New Hampshire. To me at that impressionable time in my life, Sandy and Bud had the ideal lifestyle. I wanted to be them!

    Doug Oudin, Harbor Master of Two Harbors on Catalina Island for over 30 years, lived that life with his family, and has written a remarkable account of his interesting career. Having spent many a weekend in Emerald Bay and the Isthmus over the past 20 years, I have witnessed first hand many of the events and scenes Doug has documented. I can say that his accounts of these events are impeccably told, very well written and, if anything, a bit understated, as is his style. No fish stories here!

    I am particularly grateful for his stories of the many heroic efforts of the harbor department staff who put their lives on the line to protect life and property of every boater that calls at their port. Whether you’re a first time landlubber trying drive a boat too big and too expensive for your skills, or a seasoned skipper stuck in a stormy anchorage, Doug and his crew were there to bail you out of a tough, and potentially life threatening situation. What I didn’t know was how many times their skills were put to the test.

    Everyone wants to know about Natalie Wood’s tragic drowning, and Doug’s role in that story. If you’re looking for some new, sensational tell-all, scandalous details, maybe to corroborate the recent tabloid accounts, well that is just not Captain Oudin’s style. He gives us a purely personal and self-critical account of his observations and actions on that awful night, and the perspective of a public safety professional who will wonder for the rest of his life if he could have done something differently to save a life.

    My favorite aspect of this book, though, is O.D.’s account of a life of a family living on an island–negotiating daily married life, the birth of two sons, routine work challenges and tribulations, discovery of island ecology, living in a small tight-nit community cut off from the world by a narrow, often tempestuous 26 mile channel, and fishing, always fishing. But these simple stories made me feel like that New Hampshire kid again, and reignited that imagination that made me a lifelong sailor. No doubt, like Sandy and Bud, Trevor and Troy Oudin will inspire a new generation of adventurers.

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