Coastal Waters

The chill is gone. Surfers and swimmers are dipping into unseasonably warm water these days, as weather conditions have conspired to make the waters off Southern California almost balmy. "You can get away with just wearing trunks," said 18-year-old Jeff Smith still dripping wet after an afternoon surf session with a friend at the mouth of the Santa Clara river. "It seems really early for it to be this warm. You usually don't see it like this until late in the summer."

As part of the Star Wars defense program, the waters off the Ventura County coast could become the next site for testing how well U.S. weapons do at shooting down long-range missiles from other countries, Army officials said Wednesday. Officials from the U.S.

Thar she blows! Finally. Whale-watching season officially began, as it always does, on the day after Christmas. But many of the leviathans chose to spend the holiday season at home, in and around the Bering Sea, feasting on amphipods. Ice was slow to form over the region, delaying the 6,000-mile migration to Baja California, but the journey is underway and sightings locally are picking up. And not surprisingly, given the late start, some of the mother whales are traveling with calves.

Surfers ditched their wetsuits and anglers reeled in loads of fish as the waters off Southern California's coast warmed to record highs in some locations Tuesday, turning miles of shoreline into near-tropical playgrounds. Local waters have heated up to summerlike temperatures over the last two weeks because of an unusual absence of the high winds and spring storms that normally force colder water to the surface this time of year, marine experts said.

Marine biologists have moved a step closer to their goal of restocking white sea bass along coastal waters by successfully spawning the fish at the Hubbs Institute hatchery at Sea World. One white sea bass last month delivered more than 100,000 eggs. The size of the delivery was nothing unusual, since one adult white sea bass could lay up to 1 million eggs. The problem was that the scientists did not have the "nursery" ready.

West Coast governors urged the federal government Tuesday to keep new oil drilling rigs out of their waters and to spend more money on programs to restore the health of the Pacific Ocean. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, joined with Democratic Govs. Ted Kulongoski of Oregon and Chris Gregoire of Washington to reaffirm their opposition to opening undersea oil fields to new drilling, as part of an elaborate action plan for preserving coastal waters.

A seasonal bloom of microscopic plankton off Los Angeles and Orange counties is staining costal waters a cocoa brown and taking local noses by storm as the odor of wildly reproducing plant cells fills the sea air. "It smells like dead fish," lamented Dee Devore on Friday. "Yesterday was the worst. We almost got sick from the smell," said Devore, who along with her husband, John, owns Redondo Sport Fishing in King Harbor.

Riverside County didn't invent the developer fee. But its refusal to quail when builders screamed is thrusting the county into a lonely category: municipalities that are finally placing long-term planning ahead of short-lived benefits. Orange County should pay heed to its neighbor's newfound toughness and learn two important lessons. County residents have for too long subsidized builders' profits by bearing the strains on roads, the environment, schools and the like.

CALL it the slobber stopper. It looks like an elaborate fountain. Water gurgles through a series of red-tiled pools, spillways and chutes within sight of the pedestrian walkway that connects the bluffs of Santa Monica with the Santa Monica Pier. The Santa Monica Urban Runoff Recycling Facility, or SMURRF, is the only thing preventing 350,000 gallons of urban runoff from coursing into the Pacific every day.

It was a chance encounter out here in the cold surging water, half a century ago. Nature's immutable cycles caught up with some of the most ambitious fishermen of the age. The sardine disappeared. There was disbelief, as you might imagine, even panic. Prayers resounded from the pulpits. The state Legislature legislated. News spread in the newspapers. Experts were summoned to investigate just what had cast this shadow on the California dream. These events have faded in memory now.