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$30,000. Fred opened a tackle shop below.
“Then I started buying more boats,” Fred says. His first one was
Shirley Ann, a 40-foot harbor cruise boat. At one point he owned seven
boats that he rented out for fishing charters, party cruises, sunset cruises
and the like.
“ I [began] with a pretty good pile of money because I had a lot of
stock options that I exercised in Pfizer. But, by the end of the first year, we
were down to where we only had three hundred dollars in the bank.”
It was now 1974 and fortunately for Fred, the salmon hit. The first
big salmon run that Santa Barbara had seen for a long, long time began in
February.
“So I started running these fishing classes on how to fish for salmon,”
Fred says. “And I figured we’d have them in the tackle shop, and get six or
eight guys at night. Well good grief, we ended up getting thirty or forty
people there. I was going to do it like once or twice a week, but we got
thirty or forty people and we did it
every day,
every night.
And salmon
fishing, the way I teach it, is an expensive thing; you know, you need a lot
of tackle. I sold a whole lot of tackle, rods and reels and everything. And I
was salmon fishing off the Happy Day.
“By June, we were flush again, and I owe it all to the salmon. If they
hadn’t hit that year, I’d have gone under. I had the option of going back to
Pfizer; they offered me the OTC – over the counter – market in Europe,
centered in Brussels, but I refused it.”
Fred continued to build from there, and Sea Landing – which Fred
no longer owns, having sold it in 1985 – went on to become one of the
biggest landings on the West Coast. Then, he sold the lease on the John
Dory building and was set to retire, retaining only the Condor, which he’d
built himself.
However, he always wanted to build a catamaran, and started
Fred Benko “always wanted to build a
catamaran,” so he oversaw the design
and construction of the Condor Express,
his unique 75-ft twin-hulled, four engine,
740-horsepower catamaran