It may not have been noticed by everyone, but on September 29 there was quite a ceremony in Avalon Bay. It was just another workday for islander Lorenzo Sampson, sort of, but it was also a celebration. Sampson, or “Renzo” as he was known to friends and colleagues, was wrapping up a 50-year career as captain of the glass bottom vessels for the Catalina Island Company.
On this day, however, many of his passengers were friends and family, including his mother, Cookie Sampson, who joined him for his last trip out in the waters around Catalina. Harbor Patrol boats joined in the festivities, as did Fire Department Lifeguard boats, which gave Renzo a water salute as he returned from his final trip.
After 50 years Renzo has competed countless trips for visitors. He’s seen many things on the ocean, some of them only once. He and his brothers were born and raised on the island and he seemed destined to live his life working on the water. While there are a lot of different jobs on the water, Renzo said captaining a tour boat seemed to fit his personality.
“That’s the reward, taking people out and showing them Catalina under the sea,” he said.
It was 11 a.m. on July 20, 1975 and Renzo was getting ready for his shift as a busser at the Flying Yachtsman restaurant when he got a call telling him that Capt. Eddie wants to hire you and they wanted him to start that day. Renzo called the restaurant to tell them he would not be able to work and he ran down to the pier to start his new job as a linesman. He was 16 years old.
As he worked his way up to Captain, he worked a lot of jobs on boats and piers. He worked part time for the first few years. He attended Long Beach State and worked jobs in Long Beach Harbor during the off season. But in 1979, he had the opportunity to go full-time and he took it. The rest is history, he said.
He married Dawn, the love of his life, in 1982 and they started their family. They had two children, Amber and Andrew and raised them on Catalina Island, just as Renzo and his brothers had been. They were fixtures in the community, Renzo piloting his boats and Dawn working in social services and grants management for the Catalina Hospital. She would later start a business with a colleague doing social service work over telecommunications, long before COVID made online service a common thing.
Over the years, there has been opportunities to take on different jobs in the industry, but Renzo has always opted to stay on Catalina. He was able to help coach his kids when they played youth sports and be there to cheer them on when they played high school sports or performed in theater productions.
Over the years, he’s taken on young aspiring captains and trained them in early careers. He joked that he taught them to tie their shoes and zip up their pants and they would go off to bigger things. He enjoys knowing they are out there piloting all kinds of boats in Long Beach and other places and that he was there to help them like others helped him when he was a teenager getting his start in the industry.
“There’s a sense of pride in that,” he said.
But Renzo always took pride in his work as well. Piloting a tour boat is a pleasure cruise only for the passengers. The captain and crew are there to ensure the safety and enjoyment for those passengers. Hunter Rusack, Chief Operating Officer, for the Catalina Island Company noted that that one of Renzo’s many admirable traits was the pride he took in his work. He said that his tour boat guests always seemed to leave his boats with a bigger smile that when they left than they had when they boarded. He added that the customer experience was second only to their safety while on the trip.
“After 50 years, Renzo has become an institution at the company, and while we will miss seeing him on the water each day, we are glad to know he’s staying in our community, and confident that he will continue to share the positive energy he has always brought to his tours,” Rusack said.
Prior to parasails and zip lines, tour boats were one of the only games in town for visitors, Renzo said. Taking people out to view the wonders of life beneath the sea. Sometimes he would still see something he had never seen himself. Renzo tells a story of a trip that was once-in-a-lifetime even for him.
During the trip he noticed a parasail boat just drifting out past the bay. He radioed them to make sure everything was ok, and they said they were just watching a pod of orcas. So, Renzo sped out there, at top speed of five miles an hour or so, and they got there before the orcas left.
He handed a disposable camera to deck hand Ryan Ramming and told him to go below and see if he could get some photos.
The pod had a couple of females, several juveniles and one huge male. Suddenly he heard gasps and yells from below. The babies had stated moving towards the boat, so the male moved quickly between the babies and the boat, to protect them from getting too close to the boat. And the group got and up-close look at one of the largest male orcas, Renzo had ever seen.
“That was probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” Renzo said.
The passengers later asked Renzo that he must see things like that all the time. He told them he had never seen anything like that, and he never did again. It turns out the group was all from Nebraska and they had come out for the Rose Bowl, but also left with rare ocean experience.
When the islander caught up with Renzo by phone, he was already Hawaii, spending time with Amber and two of his grandchildren Kamakaniola, 4, and Kaikoa, 2. He has no real timeline for his life right now. He plans to spend much of it between Hawaii and Catalina, where Andrew and his other grandchild, Blake, 5 live.
“Now, it’s full blown all about the kids,” Renzo said of his future plans.
He used to play golf in high school, so he may get back out on the course. He used to fish, but now he finds it easier to just get fish ready to cook and the market. He still loves being out on the water, so he will go out on his boat, to maybe “fish without a hook.”
He had considered retiring several years ago, but when Dawn got sick, he kept working due to the financial uncertainty of treatments. After she passed, on Dec. 23, 2023, he stayed on the job to occupy his time and his mind. The work helped him navigate the grief. But now he is ready to move on, with family and friends to help him continue on his next adventure. And memories of what he saw.
“There are no regrets, through it all there were rewards that money can’t buy,” Renzo said.
