Poseidon’s Wrath
Woe is me! It was an arduous day, though I don’t know if the Canon or myself had the rougher go of it. I left the party at the Cypress house at 6AM and tried to make it back to the BnB in Oxnard but I could barely keep my eyes open, so I pulled over at a park and conked out in the back. It turns out I had chose what had to be the most popular park in Southern California because when I woke up at 10AM there was a steady stream of people walking past the Escape. No doubt a sizeable number (couple hundred at least?) had peered through the window to see my nappy hair as I lay there passed out. Doh!
After sheepishly collecting myself I got back on the road and finally made it back home, taking some on-and-off naps until I felt well enough to head out again. There would be no grand adventures today since I had just enough stamina to visit someplace nearby, so I just made it over to Point Mugu and found an amazing outcropping of rocks stretching into the ocean. As the tide and waves came in the water exploded vertically over the rocks in spectacular fashion. The water would jet so high into the air that I’m sure the rocks were cloud-makers, ejecting vapor directly into the atmosphere.
I captured some amazing shots of this, but as I was camping out on a rock waiting for a big wave to come in a tide snuck up on me as I was looking through the viewfinder. It exploded over the rock I was perched on, shooting a watery plume into the air that came crashing down on me. I was instantly drenched in the cold ocean. Luckily, I had time to tuck my camera into the nook of my body to shield it from the rain. I spent the rest of the hour wringing my shirt and and clothes of water and drying off in the sun before making it up the trailhead that led up to the top of the mountain. My timing was impeccable - as I clamored up the last of the rocks I looked up and found the sun sitting on the ocean’s surface with it’s rays filtering through the Channel Islands on the horizon . It was a picture-perfect moment and my hands instinctively retrieved the Canon from my bag. I set up my gear and just as I was getting ready to take my shot I realized the lens wouldn’t focus. The camera had gotten wet after all.
Shoot, I’ll have to try that out like how I did with my clothes. I still have the 600mm telephoto lens though, so I snagged some zoomed-in shots of the nearby Channel Islands, a site that wrote the books of human development. 13,000 years ago a man now known as the Arlington Springs Man lived here, and his presence on the island demonstrates that the earliest people here had watercraft capable of crossing the Santa Barbara Channel. Thus, it’s possible that instead of crossing the Bering land bridge we took a boat from Siberia.
Neat.