Vignettes Lovely La Jolla

8/9/2019 Vignettes Lovely La Jolla

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Lovely La Jolla,

Waves That Come in Strings,

and Gray Whales

In January of 1987, and again in 1988, I spent two weeks in La Jolla, some ten milesnorth of San Diego, California. This lovely coastal town is quite affluent. Despite itssmall size, most major banks, stock brokerages and posh retailers have branches there.The town also has two gigantic Morton figs, among the most beautiful trees I've everseen. La Jolla bay is spectacular, aptly named "The Jewel" by Spanish conquistadors.



Equally spectacular was the weather during the four weeks I was there, consistently seventy degrees and sunny.

My first priority was to find a swimming hole. I had been tolerating sixty-degree water at home for the last ten years, and was looking forward to something warmer. Just north of the town is La Jolla Shores Beach, a long beach which I found strangely

deserted. When I inquired into the possibility of swimming there, I was told by a manat the bath house that the shallows were rife with sting rays that time of year. "Anyonecrazy enough to swim in winter swims at the Cove," he said, pointing south. What hemeant by "crazy enough" is that the water temperature thereabouts averaged only 58degrees in winter. What a disappointment. I had been expecting water much warmerthan this. Still, I was no stranger to cold-water swims. Singing Beach in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, where for a decade I had been swimming half a mile each day from late May through early November, seldom gets much above sixty degrees. Whenthe wind swings offshore and pushes the warmer surface water out to sea, thetemperature can plunge to fifty.

I didn't know whether to believe the sting ray story. This might be a case of alifeguard avoiding work. But the beach certainly was deserted, so I followed hisdirections to a small beach south of La Jolla Shores, and stood on the bluff, lookingdown on the Cove. My recollection is that a breakwater curved off the Cove's southbluff then, but my cousin Bob Egan, a retired Navy pilot who lives near La Jolla, reportsthat it's not there now. He did observe that the concrete path which is there now looksfairly new, no more than ten years old, so major changes could have been made aftermy last visit. Bob would have made a fine P.I. In response to a few questions from me,he launched an investigation that would have done Sherlock Holmes proud. He evenlocated a 1927 photograph of the Cove, showing a scattering of large rocks extendingfrom the south bluff. Exposed only at low tide, this was apparently a destroyed sea

wall. This may have been what I recall seeing. Cousin Bob tells me that the mostextreme tides occur during January and February, which is when I was there.

The next photograph shows the Cove before 1985. This is probably how I saw it,though it’s certainly not a breakwater in the man-made sense. It somewhat resemblesthe 1927 photograph. Some time after I was last there, major work was apparently done to extend the bluff.

As I stood on the bluff that first day, I saw a few swimmers come and go, usually swimming out to either of two buoys anchored a half-mile and three quarters of a mileoffshore. I saw quite a few scuba and snorkel divers, too. The Bay is a protectedhabitat. Divers are warned to look and photograph only, not to disturb anything on thebottom.

About a third of the way down the bluff, between where I stood and the beachlevel, is the Lifeguard Tower, a shack not much bigger than a portable outhouse. Twolifeguards stand watch. I was struck by their solemn vigilance. Even while answeringtourists' questions, they never took their attention off the swimmers. They answeredpeople's questions with courtesy, but also made it clear that they had no time fornonsense.



How small the oceanic waves looked as they coasted across the Bay, but how quickly they grew in height as they approached the Cove and curved around the south bluff. By the time the waves reached the Cove entrance, they were big enough to give mepause.

I went down the steps to the Lifeguard Tower. They had a large board on whichthey posted water temperature, tidal schedules, and so on. The posting of particularinterest to me was surge, which is the horizontal displacement of a body (swimmer,boat, or fish) by wave action. I recall a message that twenty-foot surges were common,and surges of thirty and forty feet were not uncommon. (Cousin Bob says the boardnow contains nothing about surge. I’m sure it did when I was there.)

I told the lifeguards I wanted to swim out to the buoys, and asked their advice. Without looking away from the water for a moment, one of them asked how good aswimmer I was. I said I could swim two strokes fairly well, sidestroke and back crawl,and I swam half a mile each day at home. He was not impressed. His partner was notimpressed. I was warned that waves approach the Cove in strings of seven. As they move across the deep bay on a calm day, the waves are barely visible, but when they

From a postcard showing the Cove, pre-1985. Probably from cousin Bob, but not mentioned by him.



approach the Cove they drag on the bottom while curving around the south bluff,becoming high and steep enough to push even strong swimmers into the Hole, a u-shaped indentation just east of the Cove. The Hole was reluctant to release anyone itcaught. Without quick assistance, trapped swimmers would just keep tumbling,

beaten to death against the rocks if they didn't drown first.

Cousin Bob had asked a lifeguard how high the waves get in a major storm. Thelifeguard showed him a photograph of a surfer riding a monster wave just after a storm.Bob said the wave was at least thirty feet high! The lifeguard said he had seen waveseven higher than the one in the photograph.

A lifeguard questioned by my cousin said the Hole is dangerous under heavy surf conditions, but in 1987 I was being warned about waves under normal conditions.Maybe the lifeguards were just trying to discourage me, to give them one less swimmerto worry about.

I was fascinated by the wave dynamics of the Cove. I think the keys lie in therocky bottom formed by the destroyed sea wall, combined with waves curving aroundthe south bluff. Waves add height as they drag bottom, anyway. If they drag bottom atan angle, refraction can add to their height. If they also pass a steep, narrowpromontory like the south bluff, they bend (diffract) around it, and this further increases

“The Hole” is a u-shaped depression in the rocks, shown here at lower left. Photo by Bob E gan.



their height. So, oceanic waves running roughly due east dragged on the bottom,curved around the bluff, and became steeper and more powerful. My oceanography sources suggest that this combination could increase wave heights by up to eight times.

As to why waves come in strings of seven (some say five to seven, others say seven to nine), I can find nothing in my oceanography references about numbers of

waves per group, but oceanic swells definitely do sort themselves into groupsaccording to speed. The longer the period or wavelength, the faster the wave.

I spoke with some experienced swimmers who had just returned from the farbuoy. They agreed that the Cove was a beautiful but deadly serious place to swim.

Most of those who do swim there are powerful swimmers.The lifeguard had said that the secret was to wait for a string of seven waves to

pass, then sprint for deep water. If the next string of waves caught you in the shallows, you could find yourself swimming all out and still going backward. If the surge wasstrong enough, and it often was, you could be swept into the Hole. (I would later see aformer Navy Seal swimming his hardest against a string of waves, and barely holdinghis own. If I had seen this on my first day, I probably wouldn’t have swum there at all.)

So warned, I went down to the beach and stripped to my swim trunks. I wadedout to waist depth, counted the waves, and at the end of a string, struck out into deeper

water as fast as possible, which for me is well short of a sprint. Neither sidestroke norback crawl can compare to a strong front crawl, which is what the other swimmers

were using. But, I made it.I swam out of the Cove quite a few times during my stays at La Jolla, making the

half-mile trip to the closer of the two buoys and resting there before returning. At that

“The Hole” from the other direction. Birds are brown cormorants. Photo by Bob Egan.



time of year the gray whales have begun their northward migration to Alaskan waters. Inever expected to see them close to shore, but one day a mother and calf circled theouter buoy, then headed slowly south along the shore. It puzzled me that the mother

would take so much time and energy from her northward migration. Could it be thatshe and her calf were afraid of something out at sea? I decided to check out the

situation.I swam back to the cove and jogged around Point La Jolla to Boomer Beach. (At

age 56, I could swim a mile, then jog. Oh, for those days when I was in good condition.In my fifties I was in the best shape of my life. Then came my sixties and it’s beendownhill ever since.)

I had lost sight of the gray whale mother, but close toshore, amidst white waterin fact, I saw a gray whalecalf surrounded by a dozenblack and white animals.

At first I took them fororcas, but they were toosmall, and their markings

were not as sharply delineated as those of orcas. I figured they mustbe Pacific white-sideddolphins.

I followedsouthward along the

beach, borrowingbinoculars from variouslifeguards to get closerlooks. I'll swear thosedolphins were harassingthe whale calf. At the very least, they seemed to beforcing it to stay in watertoo shallow for its motherto come to the rescue.

Why would they do this? Ican think of one reason;the blubber of any nursing

whale calf is prime at thestart of its first migration,and is savored by many toothed cetaceans.

Coming to an inlet



too deep and swift for me to ford, I had to stop. The whale calf and dolphins haddisappeared. Somewhere off the mouth of this inlet, I believe the calf had made asuccessful dash into deep water. I saw no adult gray whales in the area, but frombeach level, obscured by surf, a whale's blow -- let alone the whale itself -- would bedifficult to spot. The calf's mother may have ventured close enough to the inlet to

encourage the calf to head toward her.That the white-sides I saw mightbe snacking on the calf's blubberis pure conjecture on my part, butthese dolphins can be quiteaggressive. In British Columbia,

John Ford and other researchershave observed Pacific white-sideddolphins harassing humpback

whales and orcas (killer whales).On one occasion, Ford and hisassociates saw a school of thesedolphins harass a pod of orcasseverely enough to break up a

very productive salmon hunt. It'sdoubtful the dolphins were after

the fish, because salmon large enough to attract orcas would probably be too large fordolphins to swallow, so this harassment smacks of pure spite. Perhaps the dolphins

were getting even for attacks by orcas on them. Or it might be analogous to themobbing of crows and raptors by smaller birds. In this case, the particular orcas thatthey harassed prey almost exclusively on fish, but the dolphins might not be aware of

this.In all fairness to the dolphins in La Jolla that day, they were just as likely playing

with the gray whale calf. The Pacific white-sided dolphins I saw at Sea World in SanDiego certainly acted like playful pussycats. Whenever I snapped my fingersunderwater, one would come and let me caress it from head to tail. (One took my hand into its mouth, and did so quite gently, but its teeth were so sharp that when I

withdrew my hand I was left bleeding from multiple shallow slashes. The people atSea World pressed me to get a tetanus shot. At my own expense, of course. After all,anyone dumb enough to put his hand inside a strange animal's mouth is doing well toretrieve the hand in one piece. (I once put my arm inside a killer whale's mouth, butmore on this in my vignette titled "There I Stood, My Arm in a Killer Whale's Mouth.")

At Sea World, when I snapped my fingers underwater, sometimes a bottlenosedolphin would appear and give me what handlers call a jaw-clap, a sound as loud as agunshot. This meant back off or be bitten. Most of the bottlenose dolphins (the speciesof "Flipper" fame) at Sea World could be very aggressive. They certainly cowed the

white-sided dolphins. I even saw them intimidate two pilot whales twice their size.

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Gray Whale “spyhopping” – W ikipedia

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Vignettes Lovely La Jolla