030 Cruising the Cliffs

April 02, 2024

We set out late this morning as a few raindrops were hitting our windscreen. We'd thought of a place we hadn't walked in our roughly 100 previous ventures -- the Point Loma Tidepools, on the western side of the peninsula from the Bayside Trail. The drops stopped, and we set out under dramatic skies.

My wife immediately spotted this bird, so I thought the "bird close-up" portion of the walk was already done!

We watched the old surfers hard at work, having a boat which brought them out to the break since there's no (safe or legal) way to enter from the shore here.

There were some big boats bobbing around, going nowhere.

Fast.

As we looked north up the coast we could see a small but animated crowd at the tidepools. I sighed. I like the tidepools alone or not at all.

Well, more or less alone. The Marines are always within a few miles, drifting up and down the shoreline keeping an eye on things.

Then I was nearly knocked off my bench by a pelican who came close enough to hit us. He carried on and I changed our game plan! No tidepools today. Birds instead!

Synchronize watches, please.

We wandered up and down the cliffs, working our way northwards.

Looking up (long distance)

and down (a painful drop, no doubt).

We spotted a rookery -- cormorants at the far end, pelicans in the middle, and sea gulls (and a few pelicans) at the near end.

Maybe it's more like a giant pub with three gardens, where the birds mingle a bit but mostly keep to their own kind.

The pelicans kept flying around us and I took about 100 photos, until my camera battery and I were both nearly exhausted.

We walked back to the car for a quick tossing of jackets into the back seat, then set off for home.

However, not in such a hurry that we would miss the century plant in bloom.

We had another unplanned stop to look at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific "tidepool". They do military stuff here. One amazing thing is the bridge is only inches above, but does not touch, the water.

Once upon a time, they floated these brass babies around in the pool and tested radar and sonar gear against the scale model ships.

Now it's just a graveyard of scale models. I think these are way cool but can't work out how I could obtain one. Notice the antenna array in the photo below which is above the ships.