Palm Springs and Catalina Island
Mom watched a show on the travel channel last year about the small, quaint practuically undiscovered secret of Southern California. Only 22 miles from the caost and LA, Catalina Island is 90% a nature preserve bought and paid for by the gum magnate William Rigley Jr. in the 1940's. He built a casino and a lavish house on it, and developed the town of Avalon. There are only 3,000 year-round residents in Avalon, the town's only "real' city, and there is a 2 year waiting list to get a car on the island. Everybody seems to just drive golf carts. The coast is rocky and bluffy, with few avenues for a good port or city to form except Avalon itself. Cruise ships and boats frequent the island and in the summer months, its population can swell to 15,000. Catalins Island is part of a chain of archipellago islands off the coast of southern california known as the San Juan Islands. It is the only one that is inhabited by human beings, as the others are all a national park, and the surrounding ocean is the first underwater national park, or a protected marine sanctuary.
There is a lovely little island which has sprung up on the only really reasonable harbor for the island, and its coast is cascaded by a lovely boardwalk and steps down to the beach. You really aren't supposed to swim in the harbor, since there are boats around, but our scuba capatin was fond of telling us his French real estate magnate girlfriend is fond of stripping naked and swimming in the water to fish for clams and fresh seafood, along with her compulsatory morning swim in the buff off her 50 foot yacht.
Avalon is lovely. We stayed in the very affordable Hotel MacRae right on the beach. They have oceanview rooms which are very, very comfortable, and if you come in the off season, very inexpensive. They warn you about the "noise" coming from the board walk at night, but I live in San Francisco and this is a very different sort of noise. There were 50 or so hispanic (all hispanic for whatever reason) people hovering on the beach, most smoking pot and sulking, drooling and gawking at the underdressed women walking by, many with baby strollers. It was kind of strange. I watched an episode of "Haunted Hotels" on the travel channel and fell asleep dreaming of ghosts in London.
Dad and I went to the dive shop, which is on the pier that they drop you off on from the Catalina Flyer shuttle from Long Beach and immediately inquired about scuba diving and gear rental. The salesman talked us into a guided tour with some other people who are in the area for the week, all of whom are very, very experienced divers.After thinking about it overnight, we decided to go with the charter. I'm glad we did. We got to dive some waters which would have been much, much too strong for us as novices, and we got to experience the luxury of getting dropped off and picked up by a marine captain. Niiiiiice. The sites we went to were only really approachable by boat, and Rob, the scba master with us, knew the very best spots.
Our guide, Ron, was an experience scuba-uber-guru with a gazillion dives under his belt and who is really just outstanding. he never charters inexperienced divers, but the other 4 divers on the boat were personal friend of his and his girlfriend Connie (a less experienced diver like us who was Soooooo friendly and talkative) we got to hitch a ride. I'm glad we did! Rob let the experienced 4 go off and take their expensive underwater camera setups off in whatever direction, where I stuck close to him, and dad stayed next to Connie. It was well-suited, as I'm good at following the leader underwater, and dad and Connie areboth content to just sit on the bottom and get absorbed in everything they are seeing around them. So We were roughtly in a group of 4, but i was more with Ron and Dad and Connie were perft diving buddies from another life.
So Ron, our guide is on the far right in the right picute, with dad standing behind connie in the striped towel, me next to her and rest of the people we didn't really get to know. On the far left, dad is talking to Connie about something.
The underwater part ofthe trip was amazing. The state fish is the garibaldi in California, which is a bright orange fish with a long snout and is very territorial. The garibaldi will swim right up to your mask and ask you "what are you doing here!?" into your mask. It's an unusually bright fish for such dusky waters. The water, on the other hand in the Channel Islands, is renound for its clarity among ocean water in temperate areas. There is usually about 70 plus feet of visibility. From the great lakes and the rockey monterey coast, this is heaven for dad and I! We saw the garibaldi in spades, starfish, the California spiny lobster, which was in season, and a million other fish and great thigns. Connie scared the living daylights out of me by telling me there was a great white spotted in lover's cove (like 200 yeards from Avalon beach!) a few months earlier. I was totally paranoid, if not for the comfort of having Ron right next to me at all times of getting snatched by a great white. This, reportedly, is a breeding ground for them since the California Sea Lions are born around the same time and they seem to congregate at the channel islands. So I was waaaaaay freaked out the whole time looking for sharks. On a quick rest between dives, dad and I were the first back in the boat getting undressed and we saw a single sea lion jump into the water off the rocks about 25 feet from us! We were both thinking the same thing- SHARKS! scary.
So, after the scuba adventures which dad and I carefully logged into our books on the boat, we went for a late night boat ride in a glass bottomed boat, which Connie gave us free tickets for. It was AWESOME! We actually saw a sea lion swimming in out lights under the water for a ways, TONS of lobster, who comes out at ngiht. We saw a leopard shark and a ton of fish, but no big, scary sharks. I think that, along with the scuba, was just about my favorite attraction of the trip. Mom and I were just squealing with delight the whole trip! I need a glass-bottom boat.
We decided, the next day, to take a trip in the interior of the island and see the sights. It was expensive, and although we didn't realize that Connie's tickets would still be good, we paid for it on our own. I was planning to get away by myself for a few hours, but mom wanted to go, then dad wanted to go, too. S we all got on board this small bus with this totally obnoxious DJ/emcee guy who lead us through a 3 hour tour of the inlands. Apparently, they let loose a flock of wild boar in the 40's and a heard of buffalo to graze on the land and used them for sport. They destroyed the indigenous plants and species, eating all the grenery, and are now being hunted (at least the pigs are). The Buffalo are currently free to roam wherever they may.
The island is 90% owned by a nature conservancy, so the land is undeveloped except for a vrey few sites. The buffalo are actually being removed, as are all of the wild boar, as they find them, to repopulate ths island with its natural flora and fauna. I thought of calling Robert the whole time i was there, to comission him to hunt and kill all of the wild baor on the island...
