FEATURED BLOG: Hope Doesn't Float

     Good morning and greetings, summer weather fans. It’s the time of year that folks jam Highway 17 to flock to the beaches here on the Central Coast. As for myself, due to the fact that the sun is no longer my friend and the water temperature (57 degrees) is a tad cool, you won’t find me frolicking in the waves or burying myself in the sand. And besides, with the chilliness of the water, in the words of George Constanza, we are looking at “significant shrinkage.”

     So when I ran across a story written by Paul Rogers in the San Jose Mercury News that may affect beachgoers here on Monterey Bay, I wanted to get the word out to the people.

     Back in March, Japan was hit by an devastating earthquake and tsunami that decimated the landscape north of Tokyo. It was truly March Madness. Millions of tons of debris, including everything from couches to convertibles to chop sticks, were swept into the ocean. This conglomeration is now floating in the Pacific and heading towards the west coast. More than 200,000 buildings were washed out to sea by waves the size of Godzilla. This has created a floating concoction of rubbish never before seen on the open seas, the History Channel or at a Tea Party convention.

     Like a floating flea market of assorted junk, this giant mass is moving
across hundreds of miles of the open Pacific. We’re talking cars,
boats and even fully furnished homes that are bobbing along in the Pacific, which could create real problems for ships, marine life and Somali pirates. By the way Russell Crowe flies, it is expected to say aloha to the Hawaiian Islands by next spring and hit the beaches in California, Oregon and Washington in 2013 or early 2014. It will give new meaning to the term “the coast is clear.”

     This body of awful Japanese memories is moving at a rate of about 10 miles a day, or the same distance I run twice daily in preparation for the Ultra Ironman Triathlon. It is spread out over an area about 350 miles wide and 1,300 miles long, which is basically the size of California without Starbucks or In-N-Out Burgers. What makes it even trickier is that neither scientists or skim boarders know the exact density of this mess, as to what is still floating and what, like my hopes of my future being ahead of me, have sunk.

     The Pacific Ocean is a rather large glass of water, as there is about 3,800 miles of wide open ocean between the land of the Rising Sun and Waimea Bay. If the debris doesn’t make it to our shores by 2014, it will end up in the “North Pacific Garbage Patch,” a lovely little spot 1,000 miles west of California where plastic goes to die. Reports say it is three times the size of Texas and that several dozen abandoned yachts have been spotting in this floating continent of litter. I believe it all comes down to the the scene in “The Graduate” when a Los Angeles businessman takes Dustin Hoffman aside and declares, “I just want to say one word to you — just one word — plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.”

     So coming to our shores sometime in the near future, the newest Japanese import, a gigantic floating mass of tragedy never before seen, courtesy one of the great natural disasters of our lifetime. No one knows for sure how much of an environmental mess this will result in, but either way, it will certainly be an unfortunate and inconvenient truth.

     So while we’re on the subject of beaches, I thought for our photographic test flight that we would journey up to one of the hidden jewels of the north coast, Panther Beach or as others prefer, Hole-In-The-Wall Beach. The color of the sandstone cliffs here is beyond amazing, as are the number of sea stars and sea anemomes that cling to the jagged rocks. This wind-swept spot is just south of Davenport, less than ten minutes from the westside and well-worth the trip. And here’s a little tip-the beach is only accessible at low tide, so check your charts before you head north.

     To see more of this gem from the North Coast, click on http://www.SunriseSantaCruz.com.