I never intended for Travels in San Diego to be a forum for San Diego dog news, let along bulldog news, but I can’t resist saluting the Beach & Bay Press’s article today about Floyd the skateboarding bulldog. Is this a trend? I’ve seen at least one other skateboarding bulldog (see photo). 
Floyd’s Youtube video is awesome too. Check out the way he steers!
The new home of the California Surf Museum opened February 16, and it took me way too long to check it out. Having finally rectified that, I can report that it’s worth the trip. I plan to stop in again any time I’m anywhere remotely near the neighborhood. Anyone with any interest in San Diego’s vibrant surfing history should do the same.
The neighborhood is Oceanside, home to the CSM since 1991. (Founded in 1986, the museum first occupied George’s Restaurant in Encinitas, then moved to Encinitas’s Moonlight Plaza and later for a few years to Promenade Plaza in Pacific Beach.) Most recently, it was crammed into a former drugstore at the corner of Coast Highway and Pier View Way. The new venue is just a block away at 312 Pier View, but in terms of ambience, it could be in another country: sleek and modern and First World, rather than old and funky and vaguely Undeveloped.
The exhibition space, in particular, is a huge improvement. Two excellent exhibits currently fill it. The “Timeline of Surfing” looks chronologically at the many ways in which surfing has influenced California (and more broader American) culture over the past 100 years. Large panels nicely explain the many artifacts, which include the wooden board crafted by Ralph Noisat that may well have been the first ever used to surf the waters off San Diego. (I presented the evidence for this in a December 14, 2006 Reader cover story.) 
The other current exhibit, Sidewalk Surfers, looks at the history of skateboarding — totally appropriate considering the links between the two board sports. I was particularly thrilled to see the crude conveyance cobbled together by local surfer Peter Parkin in 1947, and reputed to be the first true skateboard on earth.
The skateboarding exhibit is a private collection by local skater/surfer Dale Smith, and like the Timeline, it won’t be displayed permanently. Along with the changing exhibitions, the museum has an ample gift shop (though in the large, new space, the items for sale feel somehow fewer than those offered in the old former drugstore). And there’s a busy events schedule, with the museum’s annual Legend’s Day up next on Sunday, October 4. This year it honors Duke Boyd, creator of the Hang Ten line of clothing, and the man who brought indispensable Velcro to the surfing world. Free Legends Day activities will also include a performance by the Moonlight Beach Ukulele Strummers and Dancers, followed by a luau (for which admission is $20 for non-members.)
One of the best opportunities for taking in some of San Diego’s quirkiest beach life will occur tomorrow (Saturday, 
June 20) in Imperial Beach. If the 4th annual surf dog competition (sponsored by Loews Coronado resort) is anything like the one I attended 2 years, wacky dog costumes will abound, as will amazing acts of doggy balance and fortitude, all cheered on by a crowd of boisterous beach goers.
Do the canine participants enjoy it all? I certainly saw plenty of wagging tales and didn’t observe any pooch slinking away from its handler. Organizers are talking about an even bigger turn-out than the 60 dogs who were registered last year.
Here’s the schedule:
10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Optional practice session for registered dogs
11 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. Category One: Small Surf Dogs (40 pounds and under)
11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Category Two: Large Surf Dogs (41 pounds and over)
12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Category Three: Tandem Surfing for Surf Dogs & Humans, or Two Surf Dogs
1:45 p.m. Awards Ceremony
It all should happen just north of the IB Pier, which extends off the end of Evergreen Avenue in Imperial Beach.
Strolling down Bayside Walk in Mission Beach the other morning, we appreciated Patt Miller’s unique Valentine to the community: a cheery row of pink, red, and white plastic sand shovels dangling from the metal awning of her cottage just south of Santa Clara Place. As reported by John Wilkens in the San Diego Union-Tribune recently, Miller moved to the bayside location about five years ago, and came up with the shovels-as-decor idea after she started cleaning up beach trash as a form of community service.
She’s found so many of the discarded toys over the years that she now changes them out a half dozen times a year, saluting St. Patrick’s Day with green ones, Easter (pink, yellow, and blue), Fourth of July (guess), Halloween (orange), and Christmas (red, green, and white). For the Yuletide, she adds a tree decorated with other flotsam-cum-ornaments.
Here’s another wintry San Diego pleasure: it’s the time to enjoy extreme low tides.
The local shoreline of course experiences low tides (usually two) every day. But the lows only get remarkably low when the moon lines up with the sun and Earth — something that occurs twice-monthly (during the moon’s full and new phases). During the winter and summer months, the Earth’s angle of inclination further influences how close we are to the adjoining heavenly bodies, and the lowest tides experience their greatest extremes.
The influence of the Earth’s tilt also explains why our winter extreme lows always occur in the afternoon, while the summer ones almost invariably come at or before dawn. This means winter is when it’s most practical to take advantage of the pleasures the extreme low tides make possible.
One is tidepooling, exploring the shallow rocky pools that serve as home to a host of marine creatures: hermit and other crabs, starfish, octopi, anemones, sea urchins, jellyfish, and a host of mollusks. For a list of good tidepooling locations, see http://www.sdnhm.org/fieldguide/places/tidepooling.html.
Low tide looking north from PB Point
Extreme low tides also provide access to some normally inaccessible places. Chief among them are the half-dozen grottoes the waves have sculpted out of the sandstone base of Soledad Mountain, just west of La Jolla Shores Beach. On more than a dozen afternoons between now and the end of February, it will be possible to walk into them and enjoy the earthy smells, eerie noises, and riveting interplay of shadows and seawater on foot, as opposed to from instead a sea kayak. To explore these caves, start from the Shores parking lot about 40 minutes before the predicted low point and head southwest. (Beware that winds and other meteorological conditions can alter the predicted lows and highs.)
For the lowest lows (also a great time for hiking or bicycling along local beaches), mark these dates on your calendar: Friday, December 12 (about 3:13 p.m.) and Saturday, December 13 (4 p.m.); Thursday through Sunday, January 8-11 (starting at 1:36 p.m., and about 40 minutes later each day); Friday through Monday, February 6-9 (again starting about 1:25 p.m. on Friday). The most extreme among them is predicted to be Saturday, January 10, when the waterline should be more than 2 feet below the mean low tide line a few minutes after 3 p.m.
A rare opportunity to revisit one of the seminal influences in global surf culture will take place this coming Saturday, November 8, at 8 p.m. when filmmaker Bruce Brown presents a live narration of his 1966 classic, The Endless Summer. The screening/narration is the highlight of the California Surf Museum’s first California Surf Festival of Film. It’s being held in the old Crest Theater — now the Grace Chapel — at 102 N. Freeman Street in Oceanside.
Brown shot his classic work, in which two Southern California guys travel the world in 
search of the perfect wave, for $50,000, and began showing it with live narration in beachside auditoriums in the summer of 1964. By 1966 he’d added a recorded narration, blown the film up to 35mm, re-edited it, and found receptive movie theaters nationwide. Newsweek eventually put it among the top ten films of that year.
The upcoming event will reunite the 71-year-old Brown with the film’s two stars, Robert August and (San Diego native) Mike Hynson. General admission is $35.
A dozen other films will be included in the three-day festival, which opens Friday. For a full schedule, see www.californiasurffestival.com.
Anyone who enjoys the beach should love The Map, the depiction of La Jolla Underwater Park and Ecological Reserve unveiled September 12 at La Jolla Shores.
Created on a once-unlovely 2300-square-foot corner of Kellogg Park between the park’s south comfort station and the playground, The Map lets visitors understand at a glance the orientation of the remarkable offshore canyons. The proximity of those canyons to the shore is the reason why Black’s Beach receives some of the most epic surf in California and why La Jolla Cove has been called The Sleeping Giant. When the swell direction is right, the canyon depths allow the waves to build to awesome heights.
The park is also home to a rich assembly of marine life, so The Map is studded with life-size chromatically accurate depictions of resident animals and invertebrates, each keyed with a number. The walls of the adjacent restrooms hold photographs identifying each of them. You could have a lot of fun with kids there searching for the cast bronze creature corresponding to each of the 62 photographs; artists Lynn Reeves and Rick Sparhawk designed the animal reliefs with the idea of paper rubbings in mind.
But this isn’t just a place for children. Different colored recycled glass in the Lithocrete base material helps to indicate the canyon’s various depths. Beachside landmarks are represented, as are underwater dive spots. Short of putting on a wetsuit and spending an awful lot of time breaching pressurized oxygen, there’s no better way of getting better acquainted with the world just offshore.
