Fat smelly seals

In my last email about the Seattle Air Museum I put in the following statement

Yes, I know, the U-2 (piloted by Francis Gary Powers) was shot down at 65,000 feet. Except that it is now believed that it wasn’t shot down at all.

In 1996, Soviet pilot Captain Igor Mentyukov claimed that, at 65,000 feet (19,800 meters) altitude, under orders to ram the intruder, he had caught the U-2 in the slipstream of his unarmed Sukhoi Su-9, causing the U-2 to flip over and break its wings. The salvo of rockets had indeed scored a hit, downing a pursuing MiG-19, not the U-2. Mentyukov said that if a rocket had hit the U-2, its pilot would not have lived.^[

In the damndest twist of fate, today I attended a lecture by this guy.

That is Francis Gary Powers, Jr.  I kid you not. At a local library, he gave a 90 minute lecture about the cold war and his dad’s role in it. During the Q+A that followed I asked him about Captain Igor’s claim. Francis’s research took him all the way back to the original copies of his dad’s de-briefing when he was returned to the US (after being put on trial and imprisoned by the soviets for 18 months). It’s quite clear that it was an SA 2 missile (admittedly a lucky shot) that detonated behind his U2 that caused the crash. There’s no chance at all that it was a “bounce” by Captain Igor. The Air Force had a really hard time believing (because they didn’t want to) that Powers got shot down by a missile – so they grilled him repeatedly to make sure there was no chance he was mistaken. The Russian Captain Igor is full of shitski (he also had a financial stake in making the claim).

 

“In the 1880's northern elephant seals were thought to be extinct, harvested by shore whalers and sealers for their blubber. The oil obtained from elephant seals is second in quality only to the sperm whale.” If that’s the case, then today, the California coast next to Hearst Castle in San Simeon is the new Saudi Arabia.

The place is lousy with them.  Years ago, a small group of between 20-100 elephant seals that bred on Guadalupe Island, off Baja California, survived the ravages of the seal hunts. Then along came the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.  Seems to have worked. Today there are estimated to be over 200,000 elephant seals lounging around the beaches.

This time of year the seals are molting.

Human beings shed hair and skin all the time (well of us most do - some have run out of hair to shed).  "Elephant seals go through a catastrophic molt, in which the entire layer of epidermis with the hairs attached is sloughed off in one concentrated time. The reason for this abrupt molt is that while at sea they spend most of their time in cold deep water.  As part of the dive process the blood is diverted away from the skin. This helps them conserve energy and avoid losing body heat. By coming up on land to molt the blood can be circulated to the skin so a new layer of epidermis and hair can be grown."  Plus, they don’t freeze to death on the beach (like they would in the water). The odd thing is that they can go for months without eating. The one below can go years without eating.

One thing that sticks out about elephant seals is that they are a gregarious critter.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 has really changed the landscape (or beachscape) of the place where I grew up – La Jolla. This is Casa Pool (or Children’s Pool if you prefer), just due west from the famous La Jolla cove.

I took this picture standing on the seawall.  The money to build the seawall was donated by the Scripps family way back in 1931. Whoever engineered and built it did a terrific job.  The seawall has withstood a lot of pounding by the open Pacific over the years.

The original intent of the seawall was to create a sheltered beach and swimming area for children. Human children. Since 1997 Casa Pool has been closed due to "continuously high fecal coliform counts". Not from diapers, from these little buggers

 

Sometimes hundreds of them.

 

These are harbor seals. They used to be very shy and retiring. When I was a kid, we rarely saw them. Not anymore. The stupid things have completely taken over. Casa Pool is one beach that you would know not to swim off of without having to see a beach condition report.  In other words, it stinks. Whoowee does it stink! I had a friend who used to dive for abalone using a “Third Lung”.

The Third Lung provides compressed air to the diver by means of a gas powered compressor floating on a raft.  Most systems deliver the air to a full face mask (as opposed to a SCUBA tank which feeds the air to a mouth regulator). One day he came flying up to the surface sure that he was breathing fishy sewage somehow. Turns out it was a seal perched on the raft breathing into the intake pipe.

The Casa Pool harbor seal dilemma is quite funny - for two reasons.  One, the normally aggressive sea lions aren’t welcome at Casa Pool. They are relegated to the surrounding rocks.

Two – politics. As usual, southern Californians have been having a hissy fit over whether the seals should be shooed away or allowed to stay. One brave (and likely inebriated) Canadian even proposed that they be clubbed and sewn into coats for the homeless (OK, I made that up). As is typical with a town full of lawyers, no one can even agree on who holds final authority.  City council? California Coastal Commission? National Marine Fisheries Service? Wildlife Activists (take your pick, there’s lots of them, this is California after all)? State legislature? Federal judges? So far all have gotten into the fray.  Meanwhile, the seals couldn’t give a damn.

They are kinda cute and they’re a much bigger tourist attraction than the tiny beach ever was. The bathrooms and stairs at Casa Pool are in dire need of a remodel anyway. The money for the remodel has been appropriated; however, the construction company was restricted to working only during seal non-breeding months. As luck would have it – right when they were preparing to go to work, someone noticed this numbnuts

Genius here decided to build a nest right next to the seawall.

This being California, the whole construction project came to a halt again. Idiots.  It’s a gull, not a condor. Good Lord. Throw some trash on the ground and you’ll have all the gulls you could possibly want (and then some).

Moving up the coast you will encounter more noisy (and smelly) sea lions at Pier 39

This is an interesting (and obnoxious) crowd of pinnipeds that come and go depending on availability of food sources.

At times, there can be as many as 1,700 of them on the docks. There are so many that way back in 1997 all the boaters gave up and went to quieter and cleaner marinas. When they’re all in residence you are well served to get a hotel room facing away from the bay as sea lions like to quarrel all night long (maybe they’re all married).

One of the fun ferry tours is the one that goes between the San Francisco Ferry Terminal and Sausalito.

One of the more iconic places the ferry goes by is this waterfront complex

It could use a paint job, but the security is excellent.

Or is it? This is, of course, San Quinton - one of the oldest and most infamous prisons in the country. While it is difficult to break out of San Quinton (and there are 4,223 inmates who spend 24/7 trying their best to do just that) it isn’t all that hard to break in to.  Meet Ralph (whom I met on the ferry)

This picture doesn’t do him justice.  Ralph weighs in the neighborhood of 400 pounds. Pound for pound he was the funniest guy I met on the entire trip. Ralph grew up in the town next to the prison.  He and his buddies used to climb the outer perimeter fence and steal fuel from the prison vehicles. Talk about chutzpah! It gave me the creeps just to float by on the ferry.  San Quinton is “home” to all of California’s male death row inmates.  All 734 of them (more than Florida and Texas combined). Receiving a death sentence in California really translates to prison for the rest of your life in a cell by yourself. Between 1996 and 2006 only 11 executions took place. That explains the “backlog”.

If I’d brought binoculars with me I would have scanned the windows to see this idiot

   

And I would have been wasting my time.  Charlie isn’t locked up in San Quinton. He’s locked up at Corcoran. Never the less, San Quinton houses a huge number of serial killers (for example Scott Peterson). If you want the list, click here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Quentin_State_Prison In truth, most of them will die of old age long before the state gets around to whacking them. As long as they can’t get out, I don’t care.

I’ll conclude with this piece of movie memorabilia (good luck figuring out what it is – it won’t really make your day).

The smoke stack is all that’s left of the set of the last scene in Dirty Harry. The scene where Clint Eastwood throws his badge into the pond after killing Scorpio.  When the film was shot (in 1971) it was Hutchinson's Rock Quarry.  Now its Larkspur Landing Shopping Center and Larkspur Shores Apartments, north of the Larkspur Ferry Terminal.