Oceanside

One of my favourite places locally is Oceanside, one of surprisingly few ports on the Pacific coast, it is about 45 miles away from where I am living.

It has a very busy harbour, sailboats, sport fishing boats, whale watching boats (grey whales pass up and down this coast to breed in the warm waters off Mexico) and if it eats fish it is here, pelicans, herons, egrets, cormorants and of course the noisy ones, sea lions, it happens humans can get very good fish suppers as well.

Oceanside also boasts one of the most fabulous white sandy beaches to be found anywhere, it stretches in both directions as far as the eye can see, Interspersed with clumps of tall palm trees and the odd lifeguard tower, looking straight out to sea the next place you would come to is Japan.

My ultimate all time favourite has to be San Diego, about an hour’s drive away down Interstate 15, a vibrant, busy, bustling compact city, it has a tuna fishing fleet, a busy cruise ship terminal where huge white cruise ships push their bow over the harbour front, a floating maritime museum where one of the ships is the “Star of India” a three masted sailing ship built in the Isle of Man would you believe.

One of the ships I saw was “The World” a ship serving as a residential community owned by its residents, it is 43,524 tons and flies the flag of the Bahamas, it has 165 residential units, sailing the world staying from 2 to 5 days in each port, it is not inexpensive.