Morro Bay harbor director to retire after nearly 30 years with district: ‘I’ll miss him’
For some, the looming retirement of Morro Bay Harbormaster Eric Endersby will result in a seismic workplace.
He plans to retire right before Christmas, after having been a stalwart presence at the Morro Bay Harbor Department since 1996.
Endersby is leaving behind the high-pressure job of harbor director, but says he won’t gear down completely.
For openers, he explained via email, he plans to teach fledgling aircraft maintenance technicians as part of a new Cuesta College training program.
As a part-time instructor, Endersby will be working “in the same hangar that I worked in for Wings West/American Eagle over 30 years ago,” he wrote.
Morro Bay harbormaster started out in aircraft maintenance
Endersby, a Seattle native, was born in January 1963. His dad was a civil engineer who worked on projects including bridges, dams, highways and the San Onofre nuclear power plant.
Endersby came to San Luis Obispo County in 1984 as a Cal Poly aeronautical engineering student, but learned he preferred the trades. So he earned his Federal Aviation Administration license in aircraft maintenance from Northrop University in Inglewood.
Then the lifelong ocean enthusiast returned to SLO County to work at the Wings West Airlines maintenance base.
An avid surfer, fisherman, free diver and boater, Endersby started supplementing that job with part-time work as a reserve harbor patrolman in Morro Bay in 1993.
Three years later, the city of Morro Bay hired him to lead the harbor patrol team as chief, reclassified Endersby’s job in 2003 as harbor operations manager and modified it further in 2010.
Endersby was appointed as harbor director two years later. He said that job’s traditional title, however, is harbormaster.
Endersby’s duties range from waterfront management to public safety, along with lots of interaction with businesses, staffers and bureaucrats.
Endersby’s mantra, he said, has always been “leave your campsite cleaner than how you find it.”
He’s applied the same philosophy to his job.
“I’d like to think that my legacy will be that I took my department and left it better now than how I found it, that I raised the bar,” he said.
Endersby praised his “fantastically professional, caring crew” for their expertise and “willingness to take on any problem, issue or request, even if it isn’t part of our department’s responsibility.”
However, problems have plagued the harbor department, he noted, which is “two positions down from where it was in 2010… with arguably many more responsibilities, duties and demands” than ever before.
He added that a “backlog of capital maintenance, repair and replacement issues and lack of funding to address them” mean that the harbor district is at a “make or break point … with the waterfront’s capacity to generate revenues largely maxed out.”
Highlights of Morro Bay career include dolphin rescue
According to Endersby, one of his most memorable rescues involved a bottlenose dolphin stuck in the mud flats of the far back bay as the tide was going out.
A multi-agency rescue team “slogged our way through hip-deep mud,” so that Endersby, U.S. Coast Guard officer Adam Johnson and others could wrangle the marine mammal onto a stretcher sling and laboriously carry it back to shore.
A Marine Mammal Center truck took the dolphin to the beach north of Morro Rock, and the team carried it into the surf.
“I’d like to think it looked back and gave a dolphin ‘thank you’ squeal,” Endersby said, “but I couldn’t swear to it.”
Endersby also recalled some dramatically successful human rescues that involved his department — such as the 1990s near-drowning of a teenager who had no heartbeat upon coming out of the water, but was revived on the way to the hospital and recovered.
The harbormaster also was personally involved in a case in which a man in a Morro Creek homeless encampment was revived after choking on food and being unresponsive.
The Miracle March storm of 1996 also looms large in Endersby’s memory.
“It was all hands on deck for 18 stormy hours as record amounts of rain fell in a very short period of time, causing unprecedented flooding throughout town,” he said. “Not only were we busy rescuing and assisting people on the water, our staff, equipment and water expertise were effectively pressed into service across town.”
Endersby and his wife, Eliane, live in Cayucos, the small coastal community where he lived as a Cal Poly student.
With the exception of eight years on a Morro Bay sailboat and a year spent sharing a home with another friend, Cayucos has always been his Central Coast home, he said.
The couple’s daughter, Tess Endersby, just graduated from UCSB and their son Owen is a senior at Morro Bay High School Pet tortoise Toby rounds out the family.
Community members react to retirement news
As a reporter who’s interacted with the harbormaster infrequently through the years, often on deadline in an emergency situation, I’ve always found Endersby to be responsive, friendly, really easy to talk to and ready to share whatever information he could.
Veteran Tribune photographer David Middlecamp said the harbormaster “always took time to talk to me when I needed a video interview, and he made sense even when explaining the complicated maritime rules around sunken boats.”
Enrique Lemos, operations petty officer for the Coast Guard’s Morro Bay station, said that the harbormaster “truly makes our job here at the Coast Guard station easier.”
“Eric has been an awesome person to work alongside for the past few years,” Lemos wrote in an email.
“Eric has always been extremely helpful,” wrote Lemos, who’s in charge of the planning and coordinating station operations and training. “Whether we need to borrow their forklift, or need them to get underway to train with us, Harbies (harbor patrol personnel) are always ready and willing to help.
“Because of their willingness to help, we have been able to train countless crewmembers and coxswains through our training with the harbor patrol.”
On Oct. 12, when Lemos asked if Endersby would “be willing to help the Aids to Navigation Team restore the hazardous bar lights … he immediately hopped in his truck and assisted them,” the Coast Guard officer said.
“It has been an absolute pleasure working alongside Eric, and we wish him the best of luck!” Lemos said.
Giovanni diGarimore is the owner of Giovanni’s Fish Market & Galley and Giovanni’s Takeout Express on the Morro Bay waterfront.
“Eric has always been very approachable and diplomatic even when we find ourselves on opposite sides of a topic,” diGarrimore said. “He’s truly a kindhearted guy, despite the pressure I’m sure he feels trying to please both the city and the waterfront stakeholders.”
Erica Crawford, president and CEO of the Morro Bay Chamber of Commerce, has worked with Endersby for nearly seven years.
Crawford said the harbormaster’s management style is “very even keel. I don’t know if it’s because he’s a man of the sea and a surfer, but he seems to navigate conflict in a way that’s inclusive. He effectively walks the line between a regulator and advocate. I will miss him.”
When Crawford began her chamber job, “I had so many questions when I was trying to understand the landscape of the harbor,” she said. “Eric came up to my office and we talked for two hours. He really helped me understand the mechanics of business on the waterfront.”
Crawford said she and Endersby collaborated for 18 months on a working group tasked with updating the city’s policy for managing leases on its waterfront properties.
“We evaluated trust agreements, looked at the lease agreements in all the harbors up and down the coast,” Crawford said, “then came out with a new management plan.”
According to Crawford, Endersby has dealt with hot-button issues such as offshore wind-generated energy, the marine sanctuary, the Morro Bay Power Plant, commercial fishing, charter fishing and cruises.
No matter the issue, she said, “Eric’s always willing to get in there and negotiate.”
“He also gives the best harbor tour ever,” she added with a laugh. “He has such a wealth of knowledge. Not to mention, he’s the best joke teller on the city staff.”
“I love Eric. I’ll miss him, she said,” and so will Morro Bay.
This story was originally published October 18, 2022 at 5:35 AM.
