STEPHEN ESMEDINAStephen EsmedinaA number of years ago, I was persuaded by a guileful siren with designs on the music biz to share my lowly downtown apartment for “a couple of days” with the great but …
March 5, 2026
Articles by Scott Sadil
San Diego Reader writers tell their dream stories never written
San Diego, surfing mecca
Shifting SandsThe boaters are all for the proposed harbor expansion. Many of them surf themselves, or are ex-surfers who switched to boating in their later years — but they say surfing is a "one-on-one" sport, …
August 18, 2025
Thought about Idaho, settled for Oceanside
Our new garden up on Fire Mountain, in Oceanside, looked like hell I grew up in Southern California suburbia and hated gardening. It was called yard work, which pretty much explains why any kid would …
July 17, 2023
The elusive fish of San Pedro Martir
A model trout habitat in Baja Two years ago, when I first began my search for Salmo nelsoni, the Baja rainbow trout, I contacted Don Albright, a longtime Baja aficionado who regularly leads friends and …
April 30, 2023
Mike Doyle, Rusty Preisendorfer, Skip Frye, Chris O'Rourke
Wave Gangsters Socially, Van Artsdalen became a marked man. His reputation as a brawler traveled beyond the predominantly white population of La Jolla to tougher neighborhoods. Butch had already proved himself among the few black …
November 14, 2021
The bass at Lake Cuyamaca, the ducks at Niland, where to fish in San Diego Bay
Largemouth lust The casters trade rods back and forth. Watching them, I can feel more sympathy for the obsession with equipment. I’m obsessed too; it’s impossible to be a serious fly fisherman and not be. …
April 25, 2021
Raise your own eggs, a prince of a cat, intimate life with a duck
The chicken or the ego? Are chickens the proper enterprise for the modern family? Let’s get real about this right now. Chickens teach us about husbandry, domesticity, and death. The sole caveat to raising your …
December 19, 2020
Best Reader stories from 1987
Explosion! The sighting of San Diego was a welcome event for the crew of the GSS Bennington on a sunny July 19,1905. The patrol gunboat had just completed a rough, seventeen-day journey from Hawaii, and …
December 14, 2019
A rooster in La Jolla was just not going to do
It was one of the weekends when my wife announces, out of the blue, that she is miserable, and except for our son, our marriage, essentially, is a disaster. I was building a chicken coop. …
September 20, 1990