A foggy little heatwave...

Greetings from Didacus the Saintly on the southern shore of California. We've been having a heatwave again with summerly temperature, so I hopped on bus 901 yesterday morning hoping to catch some breezy relief at the beach. I toted the camera with me, of course, looking to catch some good beach photos to adorn my AC beach articles with... Unfortunately, the cooler weather on the waterfront yesterday was made possible by the as-stubborn-as-the-sticky-chewed-gum-under-your-shoes marine fog. This....

... was downtown looking particularly shady from the Coronado Bridge at around 10AM. Even Hotel Del Coronado looked rather less than impressive when you can't see for more than a city block ahead, so I bypassed it and went straight down to Silver Strand State Beach right south of the Navy SEALs' training facility. This is the thin stretch of sand bar that connects Coronado to the mainland, of course. There isn't a windbreak anywhere, and so smart people tend to stay off it when the weather gets like this.

I've been out of school long enough to no longer qualify as smart, though, so I practically owned that beach yesterday morning... along with a few least terns and sprinting godwits (there's one in the center of the photo below).

After a while I gave up and caught another bus 901 south looking to catch a northbound Blue Line trolley back to downtown from Iris Ave Station... but then I figured that the day was still young (and somewhat sultrily smoky), so I hop on a bus 934 and headed for Imperial Beach instead....

Stopping at Tijuana River Estuary on the way there. On a clear day you could see into Tijuana, Mexico from the visitor center. But this day was obviously anything but clear, so I went around trying to catch some rare birds on the salt marsh.

There weren't many, to be sure, but I did run into this flock of white crowned sparrows occupying a bush on a hiking trail...

And this egret was roaming around all by himself in the middle of the marsh.... making me wish for a proper high zoom camera than this point and shoot Kodak.

The Estuary is just a few blocks south of Imperial Beach fishing pier, and that was where I headed next, still looking to bag some good beach photos. 
 They say you should be able to see the high rises of downtown's Columbia District from the tip of the pier (with red-roofed Hotel Del in front of them to boot), but, 2 hrs and a basketful of fish and chips later,

that gray curtain was still hanging over the island. I pointed my cameras at the surfing locals out of sheer frustration. There were a few good surfers there, though the waves weren't that big, I think.


 
So... after all the exertions... no spectacular beach photos for yours truly, though I was very happy to visit the Tijuana River Estuary. Now if I could just find the wit to write all the places up properly...