CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Troubled Waters : The conflict between surfers and fishermen at Huntington Beach Pier has led the city to assign a liaison officer to cool tempers and mediate disputes.

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  The scene is Southern California mellow: a gleaming new pier, dozens of fishermen dangling their lines into the azure waters and swarms of surfers performing their aquabatics.

But the tranquil scene is deceiving. Since the pier opened July 18, surfers and fishermen have been at odds, hostility surging virtually with every wave. The pier has become the scene of an ongoing turf-surf war.

“I got caught in a fishing line this afternoon as I went under the pier,” surfer Justin Knott, 19, of Huntington Beach said recently.

Above him on the pier, several fishermen huffed about the surfers. “Sometimes they swim by and cut our lines,” said Ba Phan, who travels from Monterey Park to fish. Other anglers nearby said they can’t understand why the surfers aren’t banned from the waters around the pier.

Lifeguards are distressed by the friction between the two groups and the potential for injury.

“Some fishermen have thrown weights at the surfers,” said Claude Panis, a marine safety officer for Huntington Beach. “There’s been conflict between the two groups because each group feels it has a right to the pier. Lifeguards have been trying to act as mediators.”

The Huntington Beach City Council has been getting an earful about the feud. On Saturday, the city launched an experimental program: deploying a “pier liaison officer.”

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This officer, a lifeguard by training, will patrol the pier and act as a counselor, mediating disputes and cooling tempers, Marine Safety Capt. Bill Richardson said. So far, Richardson said, he knows of no fisticuffs between fishermen and surfers, who are traditional adversaries in Huntington Beach. “But we’ve had some close calls,” he said. “Some surfers have gone up on the pier to confront the fishermen, but we were able to stop them before there was any physical contact.”

Huntington Beach loves its pier with a civic passion. When winter storms in 1988 wrecked the 74-year-old municipal pier and forced its closure, the city went into mourning. “Huntington Beach without its pier is like Paris without its Eiffel Tower,” said then-Mayor John Erskine.

Thus the opening this summer of the $10.8-million replacement pier was a virtual love fest. Hundreds of thousands attended the pier’s ribbon-cutting in July, and thousands flock daily to the new pier.

Many who come, including former mayor Erskine, are lifelong surfers. Huntington Beach’s unofficial nickname is “Surf City,” and a Times poll of city residents in 1991 found that almost one-fifth are regular surfers.

So proposals by some fishermen to ban surfers from the pier area raise the collective hackles of the big surfing community here.

“Not at all!” thundered surfer Jack Flynn, 46, of Huntington Beach. “It shouldn’t be us; it should be the fishermen who have to move. The fishermen should be kept beyond the surf line. Their hooks are hazardous.”

“A lot of times,” said Jeremy Casteel, a 19-year-old surfer from Huntington Beach, “you’ll go swimming up to the pier, and you’ll yell a warning to the people fishing up there, but they’ll still go casting at you. It’s just all around dangerous. One of my friends got a hook in his wet suit.”

Neither side wants to move because the surf line, where the swells begin, offers advantages to both. The surfers find a friendly rip current near the pier that carries them out beyond the breakers. At the same time, many anglers believe the surf line is the richest spot for corvina and surf perch.

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“All the water is not theirs,” said fisherman Henry Willingham, 65, of Fountain Valley. “We come out here for recreation too.”

Another fisherman, Glenn Hall, 48, of La Habra suggested that surfers stay 100 yards from the pier. “I think it would be safer for the surfers if there were restrictions on how close they could be to the pier.”

Although the fishermen said they bother no one and are simply enjoying their quiet, contemplative sport, they have raised the anger of another group of pier lovers.

Residents complain that the anglers are littering the new pier. Some fishermen leave dead fish and pieces of bait behind, while others have been seen gutting and carving up their catch on the pier’s new benches.

“I’d have to say that we’re getting even more complaints about the litter left by fishermen than we are about the disagreements between the surfers and the fishermen,” said Ron Hagan, the city’s director of community services.

The pier officer will remind fishermen to be more tidy. But most importantly the officer will have to bridge the troubled waters dividing anglers and surfers. Hagan said: “Our object is to get people to get along.”