Tag: Cal Poly

Driving around the area I was stunned at how beautiful it was. Something came back to me about Rome being built on seven hills. Sure enough, so were San Luis Obispo and Morrow Bay! I remember taking a hang gliding session while I was going to school. I was friends with an older student from New Jersey. I wish I could remember his name! Anyway, he and I experienced hang gliding on the side of one of these sisters. It was a rush!

SLO Town

Like every other place I have lived, I hardly remembered SLO town at first – except for the street names. Madonna, Higuera, Monterey – all very California names! The area I lived in seemed a bit familiar but that was about it. It still had a good feel about it – no high-rise office buildings or fucking outlet malls on the outskirts of town. Lots and lots of traffic though!

McLintock’s Salon was still there. I vividly remember going down on Friday night for 25-cent sandwiches and 50-cent beers while listening to Fleetwood Mac Rumours 🤩 for the millionth time!

Cal Poly had a reputation among the other Cali Universities of being a ‘safer’ place to send your kids—no alcohol on campus, stricter dorm rules, etc. When I went there there was no liberal arts program (there is now!). It started as an agricultural school and had many degrees around that including Home Economics. At that time this was a field dominated by teenage girls and had the reputation of being a fluff degree while they were working on the actual degree – an MRS! These girls were affectionately known as Poly Dollies!

One of my roommates went on to marry one of them. She eventually became the chief dietician for the state of California! No fluff there!

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Morro Bay

In all my travels I have rarely seen something as striking as Morro Bay and Morrow Rock. The last of the Seven Sisters, at the end of the large bay, is a stunning sight 🤩.

Between my junior and senior years at college, I finally made some money working as a roustabout for Union Oil. I bought two cameras, a Canon SLR and a used Nikonos II underwater camera. The first picture (with my own camera) I ever took was on a dive in Morro Bay. The camera had a flash gun that used disposable bulbs. You carried a sack of them and changed the bulb after every shot. Can you even imagine? Anyway, I actually got a few great shots including this one.

I also dove several times off the rocks on the ocean side. Talk about a harrowing experience! You would wait for a lull in the wave action, jump in, and swim like hell. Getting out of the water was even trickier, as you can imagine!

No diving this time! We had an enjoyable walk around the park hoping for the fog to lift!

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Elephant Seals & Ragged Coasts

We were hoping to spend a day driving the Pacific Coast Highway. This famous stretch of road goes from Morrow Bay to Monterey Bay and is by far the most spectacular drive along the coast I’ve ever driven. Unfortunately, due to the heavy rains in Cali last winter, the road was closed just past Rgged Point.

We drove up as far as we could stopping along the way to view the amazing Elephant Seal rookery. In several spots along this part of the coast, Elephant Seals come short to mate, give birth, and molt during different times of the year. This was the molting season. At the peak, it is estimated that over 18,000 individuals will occupy this stretch of the coast.

Adult males may grow to over 13 feet in length and weigh up to 4,500 pounds. Watching them move in an undulating fashion was a sight to behold – they can go pretty fast if they have to.

A very knowledgeable volunteer spent several minutes answering my questions. I was amazed to learn how far they range (middle of the Pacific), how deep they dive (5,000 feet), and how long they can hold their breath (100 minutes). Truly amazing animals!

Ragged Point itself is a large resort area with what be stunning views of the ocean. The last 5 miles of windy road wind up to a spectacular vista.

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Mountains of Gold

Montaña de Oro (“Mountain of Gold” in Spanish) State Park was a short drive from where I was living in Los Osos. It was a fantastic spot to watch sunsets and offered a stunning view of Morro Rock and the surrounding Morro Bay and Baywood Park. As you can see!

I seem to remember trying unsuccessfully to dive there early on. The coastline is rugged – to say the least. It was originally a working cattle ranch and has a restored home on site that was very interesting. I met up with a group of photographers from the LA area that were very interesting to talk to (retired guys like me it seemed). It looked like fun.

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Avila Beach

We returned to Avila Beach on our last day early in the morning. Nobody out but us dog lovers! As I mentioned earlier, I don’t remember there being much here before. The pier here was closed for repair, but a mile or so down the street in Port San Luis the pier is open for business.

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It was great to be back 45 years after I graduated that sunny day in late May 1978. I left after that, got married, and went to graduate school in Seattle.

I had accomplished something that certainly shocked the hell out of me. I was still pretty much clueless – but now I was clueless with a purpose! I left never to return to the place where I first manifest my destiny.

Ventura Highway in the Sunshine – Indeed 😎.

We woke to a spectacular sunrise in the desert before starting our journey. We would skirt north of the City of Angels through Pasadena and Burbank / Hollywood before finally popping out on the coast at Ventura. It was a Saturday and we left early to beat the infamous SoCal traffic. Things got progressively thicker as we neared the coast. Seems like everyone was headed to the beach!

I vividly remember one of the first times I drove 101 South from Santa Maria to Los Angles. Around Ventura, the west side of the highway falls away exposing a fantastic vista of the Pacific.

Ventura highway in the sunshine
Where the days are longer
The nights are stronger
Than moonshine

Some 70s Yacht Rock Band

It wasn’t quite the same in fog and heavy traffic – but nearly 50 years later I had returned.

The typical weather pattern for SoCal is early morning clouds from the cool Pacific that burn off by noon. We stopped at a 6-mile stretch of beach right along the coast where you can boondocks camp (if you get an early enough reservation, I learned!). There were a lot of surfers and billion-dollar homes on the ocean.

As I drove into the mountains from Santa Barbara toward San Marcos Pass it all came back to me! When I first was living here I spent some time in the area with the people I was diving with. I fell in love quickly with California – there really is no place like it with its golden hue. You could see that it had rained a lot because everything was green. Later some of it will dry out and catch fire. Neverending cycle for Califonia.

We arrived at the Avila Beach KOA late in the afternoon. It is a stone’s throw from the beach and about 10 miles from San Luis Obispo. When we got there it was packed – the sites were full (unlike all the others so far) and jammed very close together.

After Sunday though it cleared out with less than half the sites full. The campgrounds suffered bad flooding from all the rain and winter weather but seemed in good repair. The pool had just been recently repaired and reopened.

Very close to the campground was the Bob Jones trail. This ran about 4 miles to the beach and was very popular. We walked part of it a couple of times. The first part has some interesting rock formations and there are some very large live oak trees precariously growing out of rock.

We drove the Avila Beach – again – it all came back to me. I remember diving on the oil pier for Halibut that first summer I got here. Lots of great memories! There is an off-lead dog beach just north of that that we visited. I read an article a couple of days earlier that the average home price in Avila Beach was $1.9M. A really far cry from the sleepy little town I barely remember when I lived here.

Shell Beach

My girlfriend had hooked up with the local dive shop before I got there. Honestly, the guy that ran the store wanted to get into her pants. That’s another story 🤣. They were up for diving though! These guys were hardcore spearfishermen and would go diving any hour of the day or night. We must have dove a dozen spots that summer including diving in the surf at Pismo Beach for clams! The shop they worked at was Dive West.

I also helped them teach classes. Shell Beach was our teaching spot. They were hardcore about teaching too. All of their time in the water was in the ocean rather than a pool. Their philosophy was that you needed to be able to handle the rigors of Pacific diving. This means rocks, an unbelievably strong tidal surge at times, wearing a bulky wetsuit (and climbing stairs!), and hand-numbing cold. It can be a bit overwhelming for some. They would also let you take as many classes as needed to become certified.

The area is now littered with million-dollar homes. Seems like Teslas are as common as old VW Beetles back in the day 😆.

Pismo Beach

Pismo Beach itself has blown up into a destination for everyone. Hotels, restaurants, and t-shirt shops are everywhere. Plenty of places to get rid of those cumbersome wads of cash 💰.

One of the dives I went on with my new dive buddies was Pismo Beach. Here’s the picture: On a calm day you dive out in the surf, maybe 6 feet underwater. You take out your dive knife and poke around in the sand until you hit something. That would be the clam. Dig it up and stick it in a bag. All the time the surge is moving you back and forth!

I had some yummy clam chowder though at one of the recommended restaurants near the pier. It was delicious but I seriously doubt it had any Pismo Beach clam in it!

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Cal Poly

I seriously had no clue what I wanted to do when I graduated from high school. I had applied (and been accepted) at Florida State in their chemistry program. That’s how clueless I was because chemistry is not my thing! My Dad was big on going to the local community college and then transferring to a four-year school. I was able to get some CLEP credit and cut the time required at the community college to three semesters.

I was staying in Boston with my friend Billy the summer after graduation. My girlfriend calls to tell me her parents are moving to California. She also told me there is a great college called Cal Poly nearby. We decided to go to community college for 1 1/2 years and then move to California to finish at this cool school Cal Poly. I finally had a plan!

It ended up taking me another semester but I finally moved to Santa Maria in June of 1975. One of the first things I did was go to Cal Poly. I went to the admissions office to talk to someone. On the wall was a rack full of brochures about the various programs they had. I grabbed a bunch and took a seat to look through them.

I read the one for the Mechanical Engineering program. It said that Mechanical Engineers design and build stuff like cars, airplanes, and nuclear power plants. That’s all it took. I loved building stuff and was fascinated by how things worked.

Serendipity struck once again. it turns out that because I was an out-of-state resident I got a slot that was open for the Winter quarter. I started in January 1976. For the next 2 1/2 years I became completely absorbed in learning engineering. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I would study for hours. I drank so much coffee I would periodically hallucinate! I finally found something I was good at.

The Mechanical Engineering building was where everyone hung out. The department project was a Baja Dunebuggy that they would compete against other schools. More recently it has been solar-powered personal vehicles.

While I was going to school, the big state power supplier Pacific Gas & Electric was building a nuclear power plant at nearby Diablo Canyon.

They were up against a strong anti-nuclear crowd led by Jackson Browne! Little did my fellow student know but Cal Poly had a very small research reactor in the back of the mechanical engineering building!

I tried to get into the dorms but there were no rooms available. Instead, I rented an apartment in town for the first year and a half on Toro Road. Most of the time I had a roommate. A thirty-year-old guy who had been going to school for like 8 years. I got to know the next-door neighbor John and his girlfriend Jane. The guy downstairs was an Iranian married to a Mexican woman. He made a mean shishkabob!

Toward the end of my junior year, I got to know one of the other engineering students Steve. I heard he had a room open in a house in Los Osos for next year. After a summer working in an oil field in the central valley near Fresno, I moved in there for my senior year.

We called it the Aspen because of the road it was on. It belonged to a family friend and was close to Morro Bay. It was a very cool place to spend my last year. I got so distracted I nearly didn’t graduate!

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I loved living here and always thought I would move back someday. I tried to get a job in San Diego at an interesting company General Atomics but opted to move to Seattle and go to graduate school in Nuclear Engineering. By the end of the time I was there everyone in California was fleeing the state after going to shit economically. The saying was “Don’t Californicate Washington.” Too funny!