Godfrey and I drove out to visit and spend the night with Bruno and Mecea. I hadn’t seen Bruno for 3 years. We had a shot of homemade calvados, then red wine with dinner of barbecued salmon with rice, yams, salad, piece of chocolate for desert. I slept on Bruno’s boat, Godfrey slept in the van. The next morning Godfrey took his mini Stihl electric chainsaw and Bruno’s small adze and large chisel and roughed out a mermaid on a log.
I had a radio interview to do yesterday, so hit the Cliff House in SF for an Irish Coffee and popovers to start the day, then got rolling on Hwy One, making the coastal SF/SC journey for maybe the 300th time. By the time I got through Half Moon Bay and it was just brussels sprouts, strawberries and arroyos leading down to beaches, I was sailing, getting that exhilaration that comes from moving smoothly through space.
Got into SC, took right on Swift Street, past Haut’s shop, then to Steamer Lane, which was breaking and surprisingly uncrowded. I SO love Santa Cruz, having lived here on and off in the ’50s. The water’s warmer, the waves better, it’s more tranquillo, like it’s 15% LA (Santa Barbara is 70% LA). Like San Francisco, it’s overcrowded and expensive, but its carefree and playful, with soul intact.
When I discoverd surfing at age 18, I rearranged my classes at Stanford so I had no classes on Friday. I took off at noon every Thursday (either on my Harley 45 or hitchhiking) and spent 3-1/2 days of the week in SC. 4 of us rented a cabin on Ocean Ave. for $20 a month.
I can hardly believe it now, but we surfed without wet suits. So stoked were we. SO cold.
There were maybe 20 surfers in town and for some reason they accepted me, didn’t treat me like I was a college jerk. SC then had a population of 25,000 in winter and 75,000 in summer.
Right now am in v. cool new barista shop, Cat and Cloud, on Portola Ave., soon to head back up the coast for a meeting in our office this afternoon, where we’ll be strategizing tour/marketing/blah blah for the new book.
Ike and Tina Turner, Shake a Tail Feather Baby playing right now. What an incredible band! Their CD “Proud Mary”is a great chronological record of this phenomenal band.
Marine Mammal Center was on its way.
Relevant factoids:
1. Typical males are 16′ long, weigh 3 tons.
2. They can hold their breath for 100 minutes and typically dive 1,000 to 2,000 feet.
3. They propel themselves up to 5 mph by using their tail fins.
Boy am I havin fun! It’s been a perfect week down here. In the water at 7:30 this morning, a shower and now latte and raisin roll and good wi-fi. I wish I had more time to do stuff like this. Idea! I’ll make a little short-run book of the trip. Where’s my clone, anyway?
It’s so easy down here now, and it was so hard 20-30 years ago. My great little Baja bug was under water twice, I had a sketchy relationship with the cunning landlord of the palapa I rented (for $1,000 a year), the place was destroyed in a hurricane of Nov 4 cuatro de Noviembre in the ’90s, and on…
Now there’s a smoothly paved road 12 mi. out to Shipwrecks. Funny, there don’t seem to be many people around at all. Part of that being wealthy people buying (or building) trophy houses that they rarely visit. Summer’s the south-swell surfing season down here and Nov-Dec-Jan are prime times for people fleeing cold climes, but March seems perfect, it’s really comfortable, cool at night and April winds haven’t started. Surprisingly, I found nno mention of the surf online. There’s nothing like checking out the surf in person.
I still love San José del Cabo. Wandering around the quiet streets. Last night at dusk, Chilón and I walked down to the palm grove by the San José river; it was—the perfect Spanish word—tranquillo. Tortillas de nopales in a little roadside shack, with la cocinera patting out fresh tortillas…
My Instagram on the web this morning came out like a poster for the past few days:
I’m out in a wonderful thatched-roof domicile about 12 miles east of San José del Cabo; it looks out to the ocean and gets the sea breezes. The surf is up and there was only one surfer out today. Surfing has become too much of a hassle for me lately, crowds and age the main detractors. With skateboarding, there’s no problem getting up, and there are no crowds. The drawbacks are, yes, pavement and cars (and age, que lástima).
So I’ve been swimming. Jeez, if I lived where water was this warm I’d be in it every day. Tonight I bagged it because of the shorebreak – steep beach means you can get handled coming back in – as I did yesterday, rolled around and thoroughly pounded – sand in hair, ears, coating body, I mean I was sanded!
Chilon, his girlfriend Carolina, and Carolina’s girlfriend Claudia and me went on a big boat sunset cruise to El Arco de Los Cabos yesterday. Maybe 100 people, dinner and all you could drink. Party time! A good DJ, lots of dancing, people got pretty hammered everyone had their extrovert persuasion on and you know what? It was fun!
We went around the tip of land and into the Pacific Ocean on the west side to watch the sunset.
A mother whale and her calf were frolicking, the little one kept leaping and slapping and once in a while, mama would go airborne with her 20-30-or-so tons, to everyone’s delight. Boat guys said it was the first of the season.
“…Wanna see our pictures on the cover
Wanna buy five copies for our mothers
Wanna see my smilin face
On the cover of the Rollin Stone”
People of a certain, um, age will remember the song from the early ’70s by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.
Well, I finally made it on a cover, 61 (ulp!) years later in the just-out copy of The Surfer’s Journal. I was wearing a shorty wetsuit from the Dive ‘N Surf shop in La Jolla (pre-O’Neill). You sent them your measurements and they sent you the cut-out pieces and a bottle of Black Magic glue and some tape. You’d glue together pieces, glue tape over seams. Early wetsuits didn’t have nylon lining so you’d rub cornstarch on your body so as to be able to slip the suit on. Underneath it I was wearing on old-fashioned wool bathing suit. A 9′ Velzy balsa wood board (this was just before foam.)
This was about a 6-8′ drop to the water (at Steamer Lane), there was a ledge, and we did this when the tide was right in order to stay dry. We’d wait for a wave to hit the cliff, then jump as the backwash flowed outward.
Before wetsuits there wasn’t much of a crowd problem. I remember a foggy morning, 6-8’ at the Lane, 4 of us out. Ah, me.
Anyone who fishes (or clams or collects anything from the California coast) will love this book. In fact, anyone on the west coast of the USA, from Baja California up to BC, will learn how to catch, gather, clean, and cook fish, clams, mussels, eels, crabs, and seaweed from this witty and complete fishing compendium. Kirk Lombard worked for 7 years as an observer for The Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission before becoming “The Sea Forager” in the San Francisco Bay Area. He conducts fishing classes, does demonstrations, and sells sustainable seafood. IYou can get info on all his coastal activities and buy the book at: https://www.seaforager.com/
Full disclosure: I’ve been to one of Kirk’s fishing demos, attended a seminar on making pickled herring, and went fishing with him for night smelt (caught 15 lbs. that night, netting them in the surf).) I’ve gotten a ton of useful info from him, including tonight, when I used his technique for getting the skin off horseneck clam siphons (slit lengthwise, soak in warm water for 10 min.) before making clam fritters (below, left).
He tells you how to catch salmon, halibut, rockfish, striped bass, and 8-10 other kinds of fish, how to gather 15 different types of shellfish, how to pickle seaweed (I’ve got a jar of pickled kelp in the frig right now, and I put ground-up dried seaweed on omelets, potatoes, anything hot). He’s big on the small fish in the area — herring, anchovies, smelt, grunion, and mackerel — because they’re low on the food chain, super healthy, and take pressure off the popular fish.
He’s got a sense of humor, plays in a band (his oldest kid is named Django), and has fun with his work and teaching.
The book is very nicely illustrated by Leighton Kelly.
Above: Selected plates from Margaret Gatty’s “British Sea-Weeds.” Biodiversity Heritage Library/public domain
“This woman…is one of… one of Victorian Britain’s many female seaweed hunters. Beloved by figures like Queen Victoria and George Eliot, seaweed-hunting became a popular way for women to tap into the enthusiasms of their era—and contribute to the burgeoning annals of science.…
…As the seashore itself gained a reputation as a restorative landscape, plenty of women found themselves there, either recuperating from illness or seeking family-friendly summer fun. Many of them were already diehard scrapbookers, and seaweed makes a particularly rewarding collage subject: not only does each specimen’s strange color and shape present a design challenge, its gelatinous inner structure means that, when pressed onto paper, it actually glues itself to the page.…”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forgotten-victorian-craze-for-collecting-seaweed
(Came upon this from following up on Kevin Kelly’s tip for using atlasobsura.com for finding “…obscure, very offbeat attractions…” to wherever he is traveling. https://kk.org/cooltools/)
If you’re not interested in seaweed, still check out https://www.atlasobscura.com.
