Dolphins and other delights!
After a few days of semi gloomy skies, sunshine returned to Lagunatown. The sun actually made an appearance at Monday’s sunrise. The air quality was so good this evening you could see the mountains and also Catalina Island, something we haven’t seen for a while. At around 5 p.m. this afternoon McWeather and others witnessed a huge pod of dolphins about a quarter mile offshore; must have been at least 50 of them spotted at once; quite the beautiful sight, very comforting. Sunday and Monday saw a little pulse from tropical storm Greg, now a remnant low. We really didn’t get much even though he made it up to category 2. His forward movement was only a little north of straight west, plus he moved too fast, about 22-25 mph, overtaking much of his swell making potential. Seems like every storm has a new excuse not to send us much energy our way. Now we have tropical storm Hilary waiting in the wings south of mainland Mexico, so hopefully this one will come through. Laguna’s ocean temps finally scratched and clawed their way back up to near 70 degrees over the past weekend but the westerlies blew a bit stiffly today, Monday so I’m calling for a drop down to 65 or so for Tuesday.
Time to check out some more of the El Nino summer of ’92 when we used to get Baja swells. Being an El Nino year, June of ’92 was pretty much free of gloom. Only the first few days of the month were gray. For a whole week after that it was sunny and close to 80 degrees on the beach with water temps hovering around 70. Tropical storm Agatha got things going with a nice three day 3-5 ft. pulse at Brooks Street. Then came Blas, but he moved straight north into the Gulf of California. Soon after, Category 1 Celia sent us a healthy 3-6 ft. swell. A big Southern Hemi closed out the month of June. July started out a bit slow but by the eighth day our surf and weather were affected by Category 3 Hurricane Darby with a third of an inch of rain falling during an afternoon thunderstorm. The water temp was now up to 73 degrees. Next week we’ll examine more of the wonderful summer of ’92. Aloha!
Dennis McTighe served as a meteorologist at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii from 1969 to 1972, and was an NOAA forecaster and earned a degree in Earth Sciences from UC San Diego and has been keeping daily weather records since 1958.
Hello Dennis I will be in Laguna Beach from Oct. 3 to the 12th. Save some of those dolphins for me to see. See you at the OI or Taco Loco. Thanks for the report. Have a great day. Say hello to John for me at the OI. Art from Vegas