Revisiting San Diego Public Dock

So time flies and a decade has passed since our last visit with Mahdee to SoCal and San Diego Bay in particular. We arrived in SoCal last fall and wandered familiar anchorages from peaceful Santa Cruz Island to Newport Beach Harbor’s postage stamp anchorage at the end of Lido Island and then to San Diego’s “cruisers anchorage” for a bit before Mahdee’s trip to Ensenada and our haulout at Baja Naval. We stopped in at the USCG customs dock aka “Police Dock” or Public Dock for inspection and obtaining a permit to the cruisers anchorage. While there we noticed there were very few boats in the slips adjacent the inspection area and the lively boating scene was quiet. Strange.

We returned to that dock a few times over the winter as it is one of the more convenient places for boaters to use the pumpout, get water, or drop off recycling trash items. It’s conveniently on the way from the La Playa anchorage back to the cruisers anchorage. We note that we haven’t found other public trash dumpsters that include recycling. Each time we’ve visited that dock we again notice that the nearby slips are strangely void of both boats and boaters.

Last month it really clicked — for logistics reasons we needed to at a dock rather than anchor or mooring for a day or two and none of the local yacht clubs that we have reciprocals with had guest dock space for us on a busy weekend. So we stayed in a slip at what they now call the “guest dock” rather than the public dock. The prices have increased from a flat rate that used to be as little as $10 – $20 for small boats and $20 or $30 for the bigger ones like Mahdee and amenities included water, power, clean restrooms and hot showers. Now there is a per-foot rate of $1.27/ft/day, amenities still include water and power but no showers and what was once clean is now a filthy restroom that seems to be frequented by the homeless community (bring your own TP).

No wonder boaters no longer use the police dock. What was once a part of the vibrant boating community is now just an overpriced place for boaters without connections or resources to berth elsewhere. The check in and check out times used to be in the morning — checkout was by 10 am as I recall but there was a lot of flexibility for boaters to get into the open slips as early as possible in the mornings. This was partially errand-running driving and partially the desire to get into the slips during the early morning calms rather than the mid-day cross winds. Strangely, the checkin and checkout times of the slips are now 1pm and 11am respectively. As if parking a boat is similar to staying in a hotel? Checking in at 1pm makes absolutely NO sense to a boater whose primary reason for visiting a transient slip is to run errands or logistics-related activities that often mean the boat remaining at the dock from early in the morning until the sun sets. The check in times mean a boater will pay for two days rather than one in order to get a full day at the dock. I’d often thought of the Port of San Diego and associated Harbor Police as being, well, out of touch with reality but this is just further proof of it. No clue.

In the past we’d really enjoyed meeting a variety of cruisers and local boaters there at the public dock and I’m saddened by the present condition of the facility as well as the breakup of the boating community that had congregated around these temporary slips.  There are plenty of San Diego boaters engaging in the San Diego Samba but the welcome resource of the public dock is no longer the place it once was.

The hunter-gatherer sailboat experience

While we do manage to catch enough to make us happy, we don’t claim to be great crabbers, shrimpers, or to have an ounce of real talent or luck when it comes to fishing. That is a good thing because we seem to haul up an awful lot of things that are not the intended targets. Trolling for salmon? Pull up some kelp. Trying for rockfish? How about some encrusted metal debris instead? The crab pots find us staring at starfish and sunflower sea stars or teeny little baby fish. The deep-set shrimp pots set for spotted prawns in the cold waters of Alaska have been our only consistent “good catch” methods aboard. Kinda far from where we are now though. When we set out for some hunter/gatherer time, we always wonder if we’ll be hungry unless we pull out the provisions we’ve packed onboard for the trip. Beryl is happy if she’s got her kitty kibble though. She doesn’t eat fresh meat, only highly processed dry stuff.

A Sunflower Sea Star

There are online prepper forums and sailing groups where a bunch of armchair sailors seem to be constantly chatting it up about how long various members could theoretically survive off the provisions they carry and the fish they catch. Months, years! by God, that’s their storyline. More power to ’em, they have more confidence in their hunter/gatherer skills than we do ours. David and I will just stick close to the supply chains and pray for world peace, thank you very much!

I enjoy fishing from the boat at anchor. Of course, I have yet to catch anything doing this, but ever hopeful…

While we were supposed to be catching rockfish, we were doing some environmental cleanup of the bottom here:

When trolling, it takes us no time at all to capture enough kelp and sea grass to avoid the risk of ever getting a fish on the hook:

If we do manage to lure something into our crab trap, it is sometimes a baby fish that manages to expire there, terrified of the sunflower sea stars who gravitate towards the bait pot. Of course, this is one way we do manage to get bait!

It only takes a few spot prawn to make for a good dinner for the two of us:

All cooked up:

And that which is left over makes for good bait in the crab trap too:

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