Encinitas Main Post Office
1150 GARDEN VIEW RD
ENCINITAS, CA 92024-9998
Mon-Fri 8:30am – 5:00pm
Sat 10:00am – 3:00pm
Sun Closed

An estimated 80 tons of trash at coastal and inland spots will be removed.

Volunteers are still needed at many of the locations:
Cardiff – San Elijo State Beach
Cardiff State Beach
Carlsbad – Frazee Beach
Carlsbad – Ponto Beach
Carlsbad – Tamarack State Beach
Encinitas – Moonlight Beach
Leucadia – Beacon’s Beach
Oceanside – Buccaneer Beach
Oceanside Pier
Solana Beach – Fletcher Cove
Torrey Pines State Beach

The Annual Creek To Bay Clean-Up effort will take place from 9 a.m. to noon at 88 cleanup sites countywide.

I Love A Clean San Diego started to prevent trash from flowing into the ocean.

Learn more at I Love A Clean San Diego

The next Encinitas Street Fair will be Saturday April 28th and Sunday April 29th from 9am-5pm.

It will be on South Coast Hwy 101 between D and J Streets – Parking is tough!

There will be 450 unique food, arts and crafts vendors, five live music stages, children’s rides, and the Beer Garden Stage.

You can expect a bit of music…

The bluffs, for the most part are just compacted bluff sand waiting to fall and become loose beach sand.

Stay away for the bluff base.

Bluff warning sign

Rebecca Kowalczyk, 30, was killed in a bluff failure landslide Jan. 15, 2000 in Leucadia just south of Stonesteps beach while sitting on the beach watching her husband surf. Her death prompted the City Council to ask city staff to investigate ways, such as limiting irrigation, to prevent similar tragedies.

Don't go to close to the bluff...

Encinitas has a 6.1-mile-long coastline, and its most developed areas are on seemingly fragile sea cliffs. While it is impossible to halt erosion, keeping cliffs from becoming saturated with water is one way to slow the frequency of bluff collapse.

In 2005, a 25-year-old woman accidentally fell to her death after she crossed a fence at the blufftop at H Street Viewpoint Park.

Also in 2005, an Encinitas lifeguard working with city firefighters rescued a 35-year-old Arizona man who had slipped and fallen down a ledge on the ocean bluffs at D Street. The man suffered only minor scrapes, said authorities, who did not release the victim’s name.

McCauley said the victim told authorities he had consumed three beers, and that the man faces a $135 citation for traversing the bluff. Hmm, considering the other price to be paid can be death, seems like a bargain.

Bluff looks like cresting wave

Problem is that there just ain’t enough parking spaces at the Vulcan Drive station, and no place to provide more, so . . . if you can’t take the cars to the train stop, take the train stop to the cars (I’m sure I’ve heard that before somewhere, about mountains and Mohammad or something similar).  Okay, so what’s the proposal?

New Train Stop in Leucadia

The proposed new train stop is a couple of miles north of the existing station, close to Hillcrest Street so it ain’t too close for starters, it wouldn’t need a new crossing so their wouldn’t be the problem of horn honking . . . but what do the residents who live close by think about the proposals? Well, the jury is still out on that one until they get a little more info.

The Chief Administration officer for the district, Alex Wiggins is said to be seriously considering the proposals, so all we can do for now is watch this space . . . .

Read more on the proposed Leucadia train station.

The Surfrider Foundation and Emergen-C Blue, which this week released their first Blue Water Task Force report.

Water Pollution

Urban Runoff

Urban runoff causes all sorts of problems for San Diego water quality, posing the biggest single threat. Urban runoff is full of “nasties” – pesticides, oil, grease, bacteria, viruses, metals and toxic chemicals - which it picks up as it flows over the man-made surfaces of areas of dense population, the water drains directly into water bodies, from where it flows directly into the rivers and lakes, and of course, the ocean. Why is storm drain such a problem in San Diego? Well, that’s because all of the public storm drains here link directly to the beaches without treatment of the wastewater at all.

Need a little more proof? Okay;

• According to San Diego County Department of Environmental Health, you should avoid contact with ocean waters for at least 72 hours after the rain. That means no swimming, surfing, diving – hell, just keep away.
• Even when it’s dry, you should try to avoid recreational waters which are within 75 feet of the locations where the runoff enters the ocean.
• Recreational use of the waters close to storm drains has been proved to be a positive link to some human illnesses.
• The pollutants in the urban runoff eventually build up in the fish which eventually end up on someone’s table – that’s more than a little bit worrying, don’t you think.

Urban Runoff – Stay Out Of The Ocean After Storm

So, you’ve just gotta’ be patient for a few days, leave your surfboard at home and read a book, watch a movie, visit your Grandmother, heck, there must be something else you can do!

The replica of an Easter Island head was last year as reported by the San Diego Union Trib.

The statue was carved out of an 80-year-old Torrey Pine that had to be cut down because of a bark beetle infestation. The insects reproduce and feed inside older trees, also cutting off their vascular system. Crews removed most of the tree Jan. 13 to prevent the beetles from migrating to the neighboring Torrey pines.

Artist Tim Richards says that instead of cutting it down, he decided to volunteer his talents and turn the stump into a work of art.  He took up woodworking about five years ago after retiring from Frazee Paint. Richards pitched the idea of the Easter Island Head, or Moai, after the city contacted some local artists about the still-standing stump. The Encinitas City Council approved the project.

“I love to carve wood and I’ve never carved anything this big, so when the opportunity came along I just couldn’t resist. I took a shot at it and I’m really happy with the way it turned out,” he said.

The official name of the statue is the Swami’s Easter Island Head. Richards says it took him about 65 hours to carve.

Richards’ idea was fitting to Swami’s. The Polynesians, credited with creating the sport of surfing, built Easter Island Heads between 1250 and 1500. Swami’s beach is a world-famous surf spot.

Swami's Easter Island Statue

A Moai is commonly referred to as a tiki.

It looks like this summer.

Locals either love it or hate it. Regardless, parking is going to be a massive problem.

Walmart parking space

The North County Times reports, “Part of that renovation work involves reducing the current building’s square footage in order to meet city parking space requirements. When Home Expo occupied the structure it got special city permission for fewer parking spaces because many of its customers had their purchases delivered to their homes, city planning officials have said.

Under the terms of its permit, Walmart must wall off and leave vacant 8,664 square feet of the 104,759-square-foot building. That will give it a store that’s slightly larger than 96,000 square feet —- significantly smaller than the company’s three nearest stores in Oceanside.

The two Oceanside Walmarts that are close to Highway 78 are each about 133,000 square feet, while the third store near Highway 76 is 154,000 square feet, Garcia said. The Encinitas Target store, in a shopping center directly across the street from the city’s future Walmart, is about 140,000 square feet, the city’s planning director has said.”

“We’re writing the work orders to have (the signs) changed out right now,” city traffic engineer Rob Blough said Thursday.

The Encinitas City Council approved the proposal to raise Quail Gardens Drive’s speed limit from 35 to 40 mph (not that anyone was obeying that limit anyways) between Encinitas and Leucadia boulevards.

It’s one of four roadways in town where posted speed limits will increase. Thirteen road segments will see their speed limits decrease.

Read more at the North County Times

After seeking legal advice from the state attorney general’s office, the State Parks system has decided not to allow the famed “Surfing Madonna” mosaic to be displayed on state-owned land near Moonlight Beach.

“Their opinion was very clear, and that opinion was that it would violate the state constitution,” Clay Phillips, superintendent of the State Parks’ San Diego Coast District, said Friday.

Phillips said that the attorney general’s office has ruled that displaying the 10-foot-by-10-foot mosaic, which features the Virgin of Guadalupe as a surfer, on state-owned property would violate the “no preference” clause of the state constitution. That clause states that the state cannot show, or even appear to show, preference for one religion over another, he noted.

The mosaic’s creator, Leucadia resident Mark Patterson, expressed disappointment Friday at the news, but said he hadn’t yet given up hope that his preferred site —- state-owned land on the northwest corner of Coast Highway 101 and Encinitas Boulevard —- can still work out.

Read more at the NCTimes