Coastal Creatures – And Elsewhere!

Dear friends and family,

Okay so my last post was intended to be longer but I got carried away with the symbolism of reaching the Pacific ~~and also very tired since it was like, past midnight~~ and so just detailed one day going down to the coast at Santa Cruz. But it’s my website, so if there’s one post detailing just a single day’s travel (barely 3/4s of a day really), then so be it.

Anyways, I got to Santa Cruz in the afternoon and, after jumping into the sea, continued north to Pigeon Point. Coastal California has a remarkable series of old lighthouses whose quarters have been converted into hostels:

This is not the Pigeon Point Lighthouse/Hostel, admittedly, but it is the Montara light hostel just up the road.

Both the Pigeon Point and the Montara hostels I stayed at were incredible, and extremely cheap! They were barely $40 a night to be only ~45 minutes from San Francisco! I couldn’t believe my luck in finding dorms available and the views over the ocean were spectacular:

Around the time the sun was going down, I got to talking with a couple of guests and played cards, shared some drinks, and talked about where we were from and why we’d wandered onto this edge of the world. I made quick friends with two folks, Jacob and Johanna, and it eventually came up that tomorrow (June 4th) was my birthday. Well, quick friends are not about to let a good time pass quickly, so we stayed up until midnight drinking and celebrating and watching the ocean and the stars:

Honestly, that’s what I love the most about hostels: meeting new people and sharing a few slices of life with one another. Everyone should give it a try, if you can make the time and find a cool place to stay for a while!

Pictured: very pleasant company 🙂

About my two partners in crime: Johanna was from Germany and was taking a couple weeks to tour around the west coast and southwest. I forget exactly where she went, but we did figure out that our paths had crossed somewhere around Las Vegas, maybe a day or two apart, which I thought was really cool. Jacob was from LA and was actually taking several days to hike the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco back to home!

Damn! I thought I was doing this trip the hard way compared to all the trailers and camper I’d seen so far: but here’s Jacob, enjoying the road on expert mode!

We all left Pigeon Point the next day; Johanna and Jacob, wherever you’ve wandered, I hope you guys are doing well! Sorry for the delays in getting this post up, and thank you one more time for the company and beers and the birthday wishes 🙂 you guys made for a wonderful last day being 27 💙

June 4th I slept in late, before eventually wandering into San Francisco, but I am saving that for the next update. On the 5th, I went down to Monterey and got to see much of the sea life that makes this area of the coast so famous:

Thanks to a local marine sanctuary, the entire coast around Monterey is filled with sea life, among them the otters and seals and sea lions seen above. The otters were especially cute, and frequently dove into the water for shellfish to eat before surfacing to crack them open and chow down:

You can see many of the clams/shellfish eaten by the otters growing on the rock in the bottom of the photos.

Sea lions were the most numerous creature around, and you knew this by both sight and smell. Sea lions stink! They smell like old rain boots that have never dried out properly on the inside:

There was also a sea lion ~~pup~~ ~~kitten~~ ~~cub~~ ~~Bing has not found me a satisfactory name for the baby version of a sea lion~~ juvenile hanging around:

I wish I had gotten video of this, but shortly after I took this photo, the father sea lion next to the baby went to roll over and you could visibly see the baby’s eyes widen as it frantically tried to roll out of the way before being squished. I know this was the father sea lion because that’s a move only a dad would ever do 😂

Mama sea lion is more concerned that I’m taking the photo with the right lighting.

And much like my own Mom, I found myself instinctually ad-libbing for some of the more talkative sea lions, like Hank the Tank here:

“Oh peaceful land-dweller, why must you malign our kind? Photograph us in such compromising scenes, while all we seek to do is loaf? Your cameras capture our environs, but not our habits, and much less ourselves! What has your rubbernecking and tourisming revealed about the condition of the world, nay, the soul of yourself, or of myself, or of the world???”

“Woe! Woe unto you, poor, pitiful, binocular, biped! What mother nature has gifted in your two eyes and your mind behind them, she has robbed you elsewhere! Your perceptions are half-truths, and your interpolations know even less! You have derided yourself from the freedom and emotion and all-clothing peace of the sea! How may a man be known by any when he has bequeathed himself from the wild and wide? Your photos will not requit you to the bossom of the ocean, poor human! No wind or rain or hail will ever cloak you in empathy as the sea does, so long as water is wet! Take heed, for I right your eulogy, poor human! Woe! Woe to you, poor human! Woe!“

The sea lion then ripped an absolute beef stew of a fart and then went back to sleep.

Monterey was once a cannery town, and has done a remarkable job preserving several famous breezeways connecting the former docks to the processing facilities (both sides of the breezeways are now hotels and shops).

There’s some joke I wanted to make about crab pots in a cannery town but I forgot what it was. “Can a match box? No, but a tin can” or something like that.

Monterey harbor is also filled with lots of boats (not working boats, mind, this area is far too gentrified to have any kind of fishing boats around), among which was a whole fleet of boats preparing for a long-distance row to Hawaii!

I talked to one of the teams there, and most boats are crewed by a team of 4 taking turns rowing and sleeping. Some boats are crewed by just two people, taking two-hour shifts towing and sleeping. Can you imagine that? Sleeping just 2-hour intervals for the 60+ days it takes to cross to Hawaii? Insane! I wished the teams luck, but that’s definitely all I could offer them.

Also of note are the boats above: I’ve worked on them! My second design firm, BMT Designers and Planners, worked on a variety of projects for these things while I was there. The boats themselves are rapid-response boats used by the Coast Guard to rescue people in bad weather. The boats still exist, but BMT is long gone, which I felt very pointedly when I saw these things. There’s no love lost, though; BMT cut everyone’s pay by 20% when the pandemic was just starting and wouldn’t lay anyone off so they could get the $900 per week unemployment that was being paid out at the time. That action, by far, made it the easiest of the three resignations I’ve ever had to submit.

This boat more accurately represents BMT’s current state of affairs than the two Coast Guard ones in Monterey do.

After leaving Monterey, I spent a few days back up in Montara at another hostel down the road from Pigeon Point. I was very lucky that the area was experiencing extremely low tides (which it does annually), and so I got to see plenty more sea creatures around there: