Happily, the Port of San Diego is once again offering free two-hour tours of its domain. One’s a waterborne excursion and the other is given in a bus. I took both last fall, when Port officials were feverishly lobbying against the ballot initiative that would have allowed a private developer to erect a gigantic deck over the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal and then build hotels or stadiums or other stuff on top of it. More than 70% of the voters nixed that idea, so I assumed the tours were history, having served their purpose. But they’ve been resuscitated, at least through June.
While it’s nice to avoid paying the $25 or so charged by the commercial harbor tour companies, the Port’s harbor tour isn’t all that different from what you see on those. But its “Working Waterfront” bus tours feel like a peek behind the curtain of a little understood but colorful and important part of the local economy (a chunk that amounts to some $7.6 billion and employs more than 40,000 workers, according to the Port.)
They start at Pepper Park in National City, near the new National City marina, unique among San Diego’s marinas for its degree of public access. Over the course of the next two hours, you get glimpses of
– the National City marina, where (among other things) some 155 million board feet of lumber arrives every year after being barged down from Washington and Oregon.
– the Knight and Carver boatyard — one of two local facilities that can accommodate megayachts such as the one owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
– Pasha Automotive Services, which before the economic downturn was processing more than 400,000 imported cars a year (one of every 10 brought into the US)
– Naval Base San Diego and giant shipbuilder NASSCO just to the north of the base
– BAE Systems, which ranks as America’s leading non-nuclear ship repair, modernization, overhaul and conversion facility, and
– the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal, specializing in bulk commodities such as sand from Mexico (used in construction), cement from Ensenada, and (my fave) Ecuadorian bananas. More than 185 million of those arrive every month, according to the port, enough to wrap around the equator if you laid them end to end.
Because of security concerns, all tour-goers must be at least 18 and a U.S. citizen or legal resident. You also have to sign up in advance. Click here to do so for the bus tour or here for the boat ride.
