Half Moon Bay Memories & El Granada Observer

I look at many historical photos of the Coastside, including the beautiful beaches. After awhile I can’t help but notice that the beaches have changed dramatically. Most of us have no idea how much bigger the beach at El Granada was in the 1920s, or how many rock arches and caves were once part of the scenery at Moss Beach. Sand dunes covered Miramar Beach and there were nice little beaches at Princeton, too.

When did the change begin? The photos seem to say it began in the late 1920s, 1930s. That made me wonder about the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge was built in the late 1930s. Could it have had something to do with the loss of sand on the San Mateo coastline?

John Vonderlin spends a lot of time exploring the remote South Coast beaches, many of them inaccessible, taking photographs, revering and studying the beauty that he finds.

I asked John, could construction of the Golden Gate Bridge have affected the San Mateo County beaches?

John said: I’m no expert, but here’s what I think is going on with the sand disappearing from our local beaches. First, I don’t think the Golden Gate Bridge has had a significant effect on our beaches. The tower foundations aren’t big enough to interfere seriously with the transport of sediment out of the Bay and possibly into the littoral cell south of the Golden Gate Channel.

This is from a USGS site, click here

Whatever part of that sediment that gets swept up in the Longshore current, along with the sand brought down by our local creeks or eroded from the many local wave-battered sandstone cliffs, ends up feeding and sustaining our beaches.

Dams were probably the biggest factor in the disappearance of beaches, perhaps not here so much as other places. The impoundment of sediment behind the dam on the bottoms of gradually growing more shallow lakes and ponds, surely has had an effect hereabouts. But I don’t think they are the main factor. After all, I don’t know of any new local ones being built in a long time, yet the beaches have seriously diminished using the 1972 California Coastal Records Project’s photos as a comparison. In fact, the general trend has been to remove dams in the various coastal watersheds to re-open ther streams for fish migration. Likewise, the friable, easily eroded, sandstone cliffs that contribute so much raw material to our beaches haven’t significantly changed in that timespan.

There is one plausible reason the sediment load carried to the sea from our local watersheds has greatly diminished. And that is environmentalism. Logging has greatly diminished and been forcefully required to improve the watershed protection techniques they employ. Farming is in a similar position as logging is, both as a shrinking business and one that has learned or been required to practice better land stewardship. Based on some of the pictures I’ve taken of turbid runoff entering the ocean from irrigated coastal fields, there is still more that needs to be done.

All in all, erosion control has greatly expanded in almost every aspect of land use in the county, from road building, home construction, and land clearing, to runoff management protocols and wetland restoration or protection projects.

We’re being skewered by our own success. If we prevent sediment from getting in the water flowing to the ocean we can’t expect much in the way of beaches. Unfortunately, I think it is a classic Hobbesian choice situation( i.e. your money or your life) where the Golden Age of San Mateo beaches has come and gone and there’s not much we should do about bringing it back. Enjoy. John

To read John’s story, click here

Email John (benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

(See more pix of the Caddy at princetonbytheseamemories.com)

Read John Vonderlin’s latest story about “The Seven Sisters” at pescaderomemories.com

The Wrack is Back

Story & Photos by John Vonderlin

Email John (benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

The wrack is back. Actually it’s been back since April 1st. After the April Fool’s trip to the tunnel that isn’t there, and the sea arch that was, we decided to do one of our regular Invisible Beach checks.

We didn’t have any expectations as there hasn’t been any action from Neptune’s Vomitorium in about six months, and the ocean was as calm and wave-free as I’ve seen since last fall.

Surprise! A substantial pile-up of fresh wrack was on the beach above Neptune’s Vomitorium

with more stuff coming ashore.

Greedily gathering every treasure visible in the huge pile, we filled a very large bag. Taking it home I sorted, photographed, washed and stored away our bounty for future use. This first “cream of the crop” selection was definitely “high grade” as we say in the Marine Debris world.

I’ve returned three more times in the ensuing weeks and captured the debris released by the disintegration and decay of the wrack. Each time, I gathered a substantial, but decreasing, quantity of “lower” grade debris. It looks like the “lastawrack” time will happen soon, and we’ll have to be patient until this natural wonder visits once again. Enjoy. John

(Photo: Is this the Ocean Shore Railroad smokin’ through Pacifica?)

Mr. Vonderlin, I’ve enjoyed reading Half Moon Bay Memories and El Granada Observer as well as your Pescadero Memories, particularly references to the OSRR, which I became acquainted with in the late 1920s.

My uncle took my brother and me on a hike along the right-of-way from Thornton to Mussel Rock. Though the rails had been torn up, still it was obvious a railroad had been there.

In 1939 I made several bike trips down the coast from San Francisco, once climbing to the top of the collapsed tunnel at Pedro Point to view the grade south to Devil’s Slide. And I also drove to Santa Cruz in a friend’s Model A Ford, borrowed from his brother, always looking for OSRR remnants.

At Pescadero beach it looked like grading of the dunes had been done south of the “mysterious tunnel” bluff you described. On a much later visit I found the tunnel portal, and since the grading I’d seen earlier would have led to the tunnel site, I surmised that the OSRR had built the tunnel either as a pilot bore, or to use it to blow down the hillside for easier grading.

Your north portal pictures puzzle me as they don’t appear to coincide with this surmise. I’ve never seen anything about this in the OSRR literature.

Re the Palmer Gulch Trestle: I have a photo of it given to me in 1939 that shows the trestle had already started to sag in the middle. About 1960 a friend and I hiked down to it; by then it was sagging noticeably. On the north side was a large, weathered (tool?) box, about 12′x4′x4′ roughly. It had an old padlock on it which we left as is.

We walked across the trestle, and my friend took pictures, of which I have a couple. Unfortunately, they are now badly faded (Polaroid camera?). but the rotted ties are still evident. I don’t believe it burned down because I saw an internet picture of it taken a few years after our crossing, and it was in nearly collapsed condition, and the text said it totally collapsed shortly after. Regrettably I didn’t add it to my OSRR “favorites,” and have never found it on the Web again.
Thanks again for your interesting memories of the San Mateo coastside.

Angelo Misthos, Sebastopol CA.

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John Vonderlin replies

(email John: benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi June,
I received this interesting email today. It reminded me the tunnel (s) story is not a mystery solved. I’ll get back to it. The gentleman from the cemetery has said he’ll show us it, so maybe it exists. I sent Angelo a picture of a burnt timber, though that might have happened after collapse. I loved that he lives in Sebastopol. I used to have a wonderful ranch/family orchard in the hills west of town during the Seventies. George Lichty, the cartoonist of “Grin and Bear It,” fame lived across the street. The Thomases who owned the American Opinion Bookstore (John Birch Society–remember them?) were at one corner, two gay interior designers from S.F. on another and a schoolteacher couple who were Sufis on another. A great time in my life to recall. Where has my youth gone?
Larry Fitterer and I are going to be lowering ourselves down the cliffs into “The Notch” and Acid Beach on April 9th or 10th. Yee-Haw. Hopefully, I won’t break my typing fingers or anything else. Enjoy. John

To read John Vonderlin’s piece on Purissima Falls, click here

What the heck is a “Vulcan Donut?”

click here

John Vonderlin’s posts are fun to read; his curiosity is insatiable and he will soon know, intimately, every centimeter of sand on every beach south of Half Moon Bay.

Keep up with John, to read his stuff, click here

In 1968 John (at far right) made the cover of Life Magazine (a story about the contentious Democratic Convention in Chicago) –but he didn’t know he was in the photo until much later. I promise to post John’s story about this chapter in his life soon.

To read story by John Vonderlin, click here

click here

Email John (benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

(Oil spill…photo courtesy Leon Kunke.)

Hi June,

If you’re a fan of shlock Japanese horror movies of the kaiju (monster) subset of the tokusatsu (special effects) genre, involving undersea monsters, you remember their typical opening with murky underwater shots, accompanied by the building of melodramatic, danger-portending music, ultimately showing something large and mysterious as it begins to stir.

Unfortunately, there are just such dangerous monsters lurking off our coast, veritable organic time bombs, waiting for their chance to spread death and destruction.

Only instead of the panic-stricken people of Tokyo, the victims of these impending scourges will mainly be the vulnerable animals that inhabit or use our coastal waters. If these “dirty bombs�? go off once again, tens of thousands of birds and other animals could be killed, industries could be crippled, and our world famous coastal natural beauty will be scarred for years to come.

I’m referring to sunken ships like the S.S. Jacob Luckenbach, that with its load of over 400,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil, was sent to the ocean’s bottom, in water 185 feet deep, 17 miles southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge. Its trip to Davey Jones’ Locker, occurred on July 14th, 1953, when it collided with one of its sister ships, the Hawaiian Pilot, thanks to the egregious mistakes made by both pilots. The 468- foot, 8700- ton Luckenbach sank in 30 minutes with no loss of human life.

The Luckenback was a C3 Cargo Ship commissioned in 1943 as the Sea Robin, strangely just four months after the Hawaiian Pilot, was launched, as the U.S.S. Burleigh, from the same Pascagoula shipyard. While the U.S.S.Burleigh, had a distinguished record hauling needed supplies and men around the Pacific during the war, the Luckenbach, had to wait nearly sixty years before its name became well known. That happened in February 2002, when scientific analysis of an oil slick’s signature was connected to samples taken from dead oil-fouled birds gathered from the previous ten years.

Until that connection was made, nearly every winter from 1991 on, with some as far back as 1972, there had been a series of “orphan spills” or “Mystery Oil Spills of the San Mateo Coast,” that had repeatedly plagued our area from Marin to Monterey, killing upwards of 50,000 birds.

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To read the story, click here

Email John: benloudman@sbcglobal.net

Hi June,

“J‘Accuse!,” my friends in Half Moon Bay.

Yes, I accuse your fair city and its residents and visitors of being responsible for the enormous amount of non-buoyant marine debris making the southward “Silent Procession” of which just a small portion is spit out by Neptune’s Vomitorium onto Invisible Beach. Through the carelessness of your industries, your recreational activities, and your improper disposal of no longer wanted items you are turning the ocean into a gigantic trash can. While it was the tracing of the golfballs and their remnants to the Ritz Carlton golf courses south of Half Moon Bay, that established the first point source I was convinced of, there was much earlier evidence of Half Moon Bay’s complicity.

Though the fishing and crabbing industry, both commercial and recreational, contribute a large portion of the debris to my collection, especially of the debris that has the potential of damaging marine life, I’ll leave that for another email. Instead, I’d like to focus on the types of debris that led me to identify Half Moon Bay and possibly its northern neighbor, Pacifica, as the sources of much of the stuff I was gathering.

Kayak shoes and swim goggles were what first piqued my interest and pointed me in the right direction..

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