California Beaches Blog

Huntington Beach, Calif.–There’s little mystery in the disappearance of the Monarch butterflies that once frequented a grove of eucalyptus trees in Huntington Beach. The trees were infested with a type of beetle. They have been removed and replaced recently. Thanks to plenty of TLC, tons of volunteerism, and the creation of a habitat that Monarchs like, the butterflies are coming back. But there is a mystery is about one odd butterfly that suddenly appeared in the park and seems to be a permanent fixture.

A bright yellow, metal sculpted butterfly with a wing span of over five feet is perched on a stand at the entrance to the park.  It has paintings of HB on it. Who made that Butterfly and who brought it there? It’s a real mystery. Help uncover it.

Many thanks to Leslie Gilson for her work in restoring the park along with Jean Nagy. Once listed in brochures as an eco-tourism attraction at the beach and surfing destination, the park is on its way to again becoming a habitat for Monarchs. If you haven’t been, it’s a must see experience.  The park is located on Graham Street across from Meadowlark Golf Course between Heil and Warner streets.

Vallejo, CA–Are you looking for an intmate evening? Would you like to spend it with someone who grew up in Santa Maria? You can do just that in the show, “Ties, Tuxes & Tales: An Intimate Evening”, featuring Wesla Whitfield with the Mike Greensill Trio. Santa  Maria on the Central California coast is home to famed Hollywood actress Jane Russell, who often sings in the local cocktail lounge near the Santa Maria Airport. And it is where Wesla Whitfield learned to sing. She is one of music’s greatest vocal stylists who will entertain guests for one night in the New York chic 100-seat Loft 447 micro-cinema, Vallejo’s undiscovered gems.  Accompanied by her husband/musical director Mike Greensill, she trained in classical music, not out of a particular love for the genre, but because it was the only music offered in the small town of Santa Maria.

Things have changed. Santa Maria is now larger than Santa Barbara with a population of over 100,ooo, and Whitfield has moved on. As an alum of San Francisco Opera, this classically trained singer has mastered other genres and is known to rival Rosemary Clooney in her command of the Great American Songbook.

The sought-after vocalist has appeared in every major cabaret and jazz club in the United States as well as multiple Carnegie Hall concerts and command performances at the White House.  Radio appearances include Garrison Keillor’s national show, “Prairie Home Companion”, singing with the legendary trumpeter, Joe Wilder, on ‘Weekend Edition’ with Susan Stamberg, ‘On Fresh Air’ with Terry Gross, and on All Things Considered’ with Robert Siegel.  While on television she has appeared with husband Mike Greensill on the Charles Grodin show, performed on the Regis and Kathie Lee show, and were the subject of a feature story on America’s favorite TV show, ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ with Charles Osgood.

When:        Saturday, December 5, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Where:       Loft 447, 447 Georgia Street in Vallejo, CA
Tickets:      $250 each or $450 per couple
empresstheatre.org or 707.552.2400

Coast to Coast AM radio often features Las Vegas news man George Knapp on Sunday evenings. Knapp sticks with the meat of UFOlogy and other topics, and offers some of the best entertainment in talk radio as he wears his reporter’s hat, asking about claims such as Bob Lazar’s long-time story and report that he worked at Area 51, a secret military base in the Nevada desert. Lazar claims to have seen unique spacecraft not of this world on this base.

Lazar does not enter the limelight often, as he told his story and that’s that. But for those who recall the unfolding of his claims and subsequent years of investigation into his story and even his background, the talk radio shows that bring back the likes of Lazar offer great entertainment.  Lazar, Gene Huff and John Lear, are featured in an extravaganza on the 20th anniversary of the program UFOs: The Best Evidence, which first told the story of flying saucers in the Nevada desert. It is slated for Nov. 15-16, 2009, when George Knapp hosts Coast to Coast AM. It will be archived in Streamlink for those who miss it. coasttocoastam.com

Sand City, Calif.–Pouring over the data from California’s Department of Finance, I looked for some trends in California’s population, and especially its beach population. Was it shrinking, growing or staying the same?

The most recent data from 2008-2009 year shows that the 16 coastal counties in California all  grew in population. Coastal cities saw growth of 0% (only one)  to over 1%. The fastest growing city on the coast, Sand City in Monterey County just north of Monterey and south of Santa Cruz, grew by a whopping 4.7%!

What is Sand City’s vision for its future as it expands?  According to the city, limited coastal development has been a long-standing goal of Sand City with 75% of Sand City’s coastline targeted for open space and habitat protection in conjunction with limited coastal development. There’s a Memorandum of Understanding between Sand City, the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation stating this. From a tourism perspective, many of the affordable hotels outside of Monterey are located in Seaside next to Sand City, and point to the possibility of growth as a tourism destination at some point. Sand City lacks hotels currently, but is popular for its shopping malls that are easily accessible along the coast.

No cities along the California coast actually lost population, but Eureka in Humboldt County was the rare exception that didn’t grow. It had 0% growth.

San Diego County grew the most of any coastal county at 1.3%. Many counties hovered near that figure or just under it, but the smallest growth was seen in Humboldt County where growth was at .04% county-wide. While the fastest growing county is the sunniest, warmest, and closest to the U.S. / Mexico border, the slowest coastal growth was in the wettest, coolest climate that’s home to Redwood forests and the world’s tallest trees, some dating back thousands of years!  While California’s least populated counties lost population, the coast did not.

Weather report this week at LA beaches - 1 beach towel coverage, late afternoon

What will this winter turn out to be in California?

So far in Southern California, the weather at the beach is giving many people fits. The warm days, cold snap at night, and high pollen counts are creating massive sinus headaches. Pharmacists have become experts pointing people to Aisle 3 of the store, where headache and sinus sufferers can pop $100 and a variety of  pills ranging from simple Motrin and aspirin to the sinus drying agents and expensive nose sprays.

An article by Tom Stienstra in the San Francisco Chronicle offers his observations on what the California winter will be. The award-winning reporter looks to signs such as plant growth, thickness of the layers of an onion, migration of sandhill cranes on the Pacific Flyway which he says are right on schedule, difference between air temperatures on and offshore that affect storms’ abilities to move onto land, and even the moon. His conclusion:  “The truth is, I have never predicted anything. Nature does. I just pay attention.”

And Sienstra is in good company. Weather predictions in recent years have been off–way off! El Nino predictions of wet and dry winter patterns in the Pacific have missed the mark as Californians braced for rain, cities stocked up the sandbags and waited, and the big storms failed to materialize in places where rain rarely comes. Scientists this year stated that the weather patterns are changing and traditional models for prediction don’t seem to be working. Nevertheless, farmers, commuters and even beach-goers count on weather predictions to plant crops and make plans.

Here’s the current 2009-2010 NOAA weather prediction, ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Advisory:

Synopsis: El Niño is expected to continue strengthening and last through at least the Northern Hemisphere winter 2009-2010.

During October 2009, sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies increased across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, providing a Niño-3.4 index. This  increased nearly a degree.  Above-average subsurface temperature anomalies increased across a large region of the central and east-central Pacific, consistent with this warming. Subsurface oceanic heat content anomalies also increased during the month, and low-level westerly and upper-level easterly wind anomalies strengthened over much of the equatorial Pacific. The pattern of tropical convection also remained consistent with El Niño, with enhanced convection over the west-central Pacific and suppressed convection over Indonesia. Collectively, these oceanic and atmospheric anomalies reflect a strengthening El Niño.

There continues to be disagreement among the models on the eventual strength of El Niño. Consistent with the historical evolution of El Niño, a peak is expected sometime during November-January. At this time, there is a high degree of uncertainty over how long this event will persist though most of the models suggest that this event will last through March-May 2010. The most likely outcome is that El Niño will peak at least at moderate strength  and last through at least the Northern Hemisphere winter 2009-10.

Expected El Niño impacts during November 2009-January 2010 include

• enhanced precipitation over the central tropical Pacific Ocean
• continuation of drier-than-average conditions over Indonesia
• above-average precipitation for Florida
• above-average precipitation for central and eastern Texas
• above-average precipitation for California
• below-average precipitation for parts of the Pacific Northwest
• above-average temperatures for Northern Rockies
• below-average snowfall is most likely for the Northern Rockies, Northern Plains, and Upper Midwest
• below-average temperatures are expected for the southeastern states

When you look at the names of beaches in California, you find some descriptive names, and some more mundane. Seal Beach is named for the seals, Pismo Beach is named for Pismo clams, Ocean Beach is self-explanatory, Surf Beach for surf, and then you get beaches named after people, places and things, with some even in Spanish.

California’s Spanish named beaches give national reporters and newscasters fits. I heard on Good Morning, America, once the San Diego beach,  La Jolla, pronounced as  “la jo-la”. It is actually called “la hoy-a”.

I don’t know of any official Bikini Beach in California. Cool Beach would be descriptively hot. Mercedes Beach would describe Newport Beach where every other car that parks is a Mercedes.

There are many localized Mother’s Beaches…but no Dad’s or Father’s Beach.

With over 1,000 miles of beaches in Calif0rnia, there’s plenty of room for adding new names to the repertoire.

Submitted by: Chris MacDonald

Seal Beach, Calif.–As Fullerton resident Neil McGraw was fishing on The Seal Beach Pier this afternoon, he held one of the fish in the air that he caught and a seagull swooped and got it. Many people were watching the action take place. Neil put on a good show. The Seal Beach Pier is a good  place to fish. You don’t have to have a fishing license. But you might just get lucky and catch all sorts of fish there.

Neil has been fishing at the Seal Beach Pier ever since he was boy. As a kid he used to ride his bicycle from Lakewood to the pier, and he rembers back then that people were catching huge fish left and right all up and down the pier.

Orange County Beaches– I just got off the phone with a girlfriend from Sacramento who realized this wasn’t her day to water her plants in the yard. Under water rationing restrictions imposed by the city, Sacramento requires residents to hold off and only water every other Saturday, she said.

I was fairly surprised. There’s no rationing going on in my beach town, and I asked her why her water is being rationed in a delta area with water everywhere, while my semi-arid desert home has no rationing at all.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” she said.  We both scratched our heads.

Water is one issue the governor of California (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is pinning his great hopes on to create a legacy after he has departed office. Signing  Legislative Bill SBX7 1 to rebuild California’s water system on Nov. 12, some legislators spoke about the debt of gratitude for making this come to pass, while others spoke about the debt.  Creating an $11.14 billion bond to pay for his plan, few argue that California’s infrastructure and its water resources are in need of repair and financing to pay for California’s thirst now and in the future.

The bond which is called “The Safe, Clean, and Reliable Drinking Water Supply Act of 2010″ is an $11.14 billion general obligation bond proposal is comprised of seven categories, including drought relief, water supply reliability, Delta sustainability, statewide water system operational improvement, conservation and watershed protection, groundwater protection and water quality, and water recycling and water conservation.  See the fact sheet on this: http:// gov.ca.gov/fact-sheet/13823

Only one California ski resort made Outside magazine’s top ski resorts list and it was Mammoth, where over 200 inches of snow falls annually, according to NOAA.  In addition to powder throughout the season (one of the longest ski seasons in the nation,) the sunshine breaks out often between storms and provides some softening of the snow, ideal for learning tricks.

With one of the fastest chair turn around times (around 8 minutes,) you spend more time on the slopes and less time waiting to ski.

Californians are proud of our many ski resorts– Tahoe, Mammoth, and Bear Mountain,  but we still travel and enjoy the slopes in nearby states. Life is great in the west. You’ve got the beaches in the morning, and the slopes in afternoon. Note: If you haven’t booked a Mammoth holiday yet, you better do it now. The Christmas holidays are generally a sell-out, or close to it.

Going on this weekend is the Silicon Valley Ski & Snowboard Festival. Held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, the event features many ski resorts throughout the U.S., plus discounts, packages, and local ski clubs in the Bay Area. sfskifest.com

A segull sits on Seal Beach Pier, enjoying the perfect day.

California Beaches — Go to any beach–Santa Monica, Pismo Beach, Half Moon Bay, Bodega Bay, San Diego–and you’re going to see tons of birds. Pelicans, egrets, seagulls, herons, terns, willets, sandpipers, and even the unappreciated pigeons that live along the 1000 or more miles of California shores, are fun to watch, but sometimes they fly directly overhead. And with each graceful swoop, we humans may fear the poop.

Trying to photograph California’s pier structures such as restaurants can be a key part of your visit, but then you notice that like icing on a cake, a pier restaurant’s roof or the lifeguard lookout tower is dripping with white bird poop. Worse yet, is when you hear the splat and you become the next victim of the bird doo-doo! It happens to nearly everyone, unless they spend their time dodging the bird “bullets”.

Do you ever wonder what’s in that white gooey stuff? And how do you get it off your clothing ?  Here’s the skinny on bird poop:

First, birds don’t urinate like other animals. Their poop is the main thing they release as waste. Birds’ kidneys extract nitrogenous wastes from the bloodstream, but instead of excreting it as urea dissolved in urine as we do, they excrete it in the form of uric acid. Uric acid has a very low solubility in water, so it emerges as a white paste. This material, as well as the output of the intestines, emerges from the bird’s cloaca. The cloaca is a multi-purpose hole for birds: their wastes come out of it, they have sex by putting their cloacas together, and females lay eggs out of it.

So how do we get the bird poop off our clothes without staining them? In three easy steps you’ll be like new.

• Step 1 - Clean off any poop on your clothing with a knife, spoon, napkin or something that softly lifts or scrapes it off. Make sure you scrape it off from out to in, to ensure that you don’t spread the stain any more.
• Step 2 -  Flush the stain out in cold water. Scrub at it with a cloth while you are doing so.
• Step 3 - If the stain persists, treat the stain with hydrogen peroxide to remove any lasting residue. Hydrogen peroxide or some other bleach that is safe on the fabric in a 3% hydrogen peroxide solution that is most often used for first aid usually works. Be sure to test a hidden area for colorfastness before treating the stain.

Now you can walk on any pier, knowing that those birds can’t ruin your perfect day. Seeing them will only make it better as you take a picture and appreciate their amazingly functional bodies. Anything they throw your way will be a walk in the park, or a stroll on the beach, so to speak.