San Diego County Beaches Face Rocky Future

Silja Hunter had tried it all, but she just couldn’t get comfortable on the wide stretch of cobbles that covers Moonlight State Beach.

Spreading her green beach blanket on the sun-baked stones, the 37-year-old Jazzercize teacher stretched out on her back. Ouch. She tried her stomach. No good. She even tucked her son’s Boogie Board beneath her, but it provided little comfort.

“Every year it seems to get worse and worse,” Hunter, a Leucadia resident, said as she surveyed the swath of fist-sized rocks from the refuge of a beach chair. “I’m afraid these cobbles are here to stay.”

That sort of predicament faces visitors to beaches up and down the San Diego County coast this year. With summer just around the bend, many residents of the string of coastal beach towns stretching north from San Diego are wondering when--and if--the sand will return to the shoreline.

While experts say beaches in San Diego have started to recover after being drastically stripped by the disastrous storms of 1982 and 1983, the coastline in towns such as Encinitas, Leucadia and Carlsbad has yet to regain much of the sand swept off by winter waves.

“It’s very frustrating to see it melt away before your eyes,” said Bill Fait, regional manager of the state’s beach parks. “Each year there’s less sand that’s coming back in.”

At high tide, nary a speck of sand covers the shoreline at Ponto in southern Carlsbad. Instead, a steep berm of cobbles has given the area the look of a lunar landscape.

Cobbles also cover the shore along wide stretches of Leucadia and Encinitas. At San Elijo State Beach in Cardiff, fields of sea-smoothed rocks litter the coast. In several spots, waves have stripped most of the sand in the surf zone, leaving a barren, rocky reef for swimmers and surfers to contend with.

Some areas have fared better. Probably the widest beaches along the county’s northern coast can be found in Oceanside, where dredging operations at the city’s harbor have helped increase the stock of sand. In Del Mar, meanwhile, the

beaches have begun in recent weeks to regain their health after being scoured by winter storms.

Although beach erosion is nothing new for the North County area, local elected officials have only recently begun to take a comprehensive look at a solution.

Last year, leaders of several North County cities formed a regional organization to grapple with the coastal issue. Dubbed BEACh (Beach Erosion Action Committee), the group has made little progress, largely because its leaders say they are waiting to see if the City of San Diego will join them. Moreover, the group has no money, although organizers hope to win some of the $2.5 million in state assistance that is available this year for inter-government groups.

Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers has embarked on an ambitious, six-year study of California’s beach erosion problem that, when completed in 1989, is expected to yield a harvest of information. Local and county officials are counting on the study to point out potential remedies that could prove a balm to the region’s troubles.

“Erosion is a big problem,” said Carlsbad Councilwoman Ann Kulchin, a member of the coalition of beachfront cities. “We talk a lot about the effect on tourism, but it’s a big problem for residents. I used to love walking along the beach. Now you walk across cobbles.”

The dearth of sand has kept visitors away from some stretches of beach that were once among the most popular in the area.

“A few years ago, Ponto used to be extremely busy,” Fait recalled. “It used to be hard finding a parking space around there. That hasn’t been the case the last couple of years. It’s simply not as nice a recreational area with all the cobbles.”

Mike Lucas, a state lifeguard at the beach, agreed. He vividly remembers what Ponto was like six years ago, when he started working there. The sand extended from the surf up 50 yards to the coastal highway.

Today, his lifeguard tower sits on a nest of rocks. While making a rescue, Lucas must wear deck shoes or risk injuring his feet while running across the cobbles. And the beach, which once drew as many as 1,000 sunbathers on a holiday weekend, is lucky now to get 75, he said.

“If we had the sand, we’d have the crowds,” Lucas said. “We may get a little bit of sand back this summer. But it looks like we’ll be stuck with these cobbles for a long time.”

Aside from worries that the shortage of sand spoils the beaches’ recreational allure, local leaders have also grown concerned about its impact on the tourist trade. Indeed, the beach traditionally has been the top drawing card for tourists visiting North County.

“A beach is a powerful attraction for many people,” said Al Reese, spokesman for the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau. “In areas like Oceanside, I think it would be a major problem if they lost their beach. It’s the major attraction for that city.”

Eager to sidetrack the erosion problem, North County cities have come up with a cornucopia of gadgets and gimmicks to try to stem the flow of sand off the beaches. Most have met with little success.

Often, the proposals have failed to materialize because of budget constraints or community opposition. In Oceanside, officials proposed building jetties in 1983 to catch sand flowing down the coast, but the project failed to win voter approval for funding.

Carlsbad toyed with planting artificial seaweed on the ocean floor to ease the force of waves and allow sand to settle on shore. That proposal was never realized after Gov. George Deukmejian slashed it from the state budget.

Even those projects that were built seemed to do little good. In both Del Mar and Carlsbad, a sausage-shaped device called a Longard tube was planted parallel with the shore in hopes of trapping sand. The device proved a dismal failure in Del Mar, ripping apart under the pounding of surf, and has had only limited success along a 1,000-foot strip of beach in Carlsbad.

In Oceanside, nearly 2 million cubic yards of sand was dumped onto the shoreline by the Army Corps of Engineers during 1980 and 1982, but much of that was washed out by waves whipped up during the severe winter storms that followed.

Despite such setbacks, local officials have pressed ahead. Carlsbad leaders are eager to use 2.5 million cubic yards of sand scheduled to be dredged next year from Batiquitos Lagoon to lay a 5-mile-long blanket of beach along the city’s shoreline.

Officials in Oceanside, meanwhile, are anxiously awaiting the completion of a federally funded sand bypass system that will suck up grains being trapped by the harbor breakwater and pipe them to the city’s southern beaches. The $5.5-million system, officials hope, will provide a more permanent solution to beach erosion.

So far, however, nothing has stopped the forces of Mother Nature.

While coastal experts differ on the exact causes of beach erosion, most agree that the problem has been aggravated by dams built on rivers that had traditionally delivered sand to the ocean.

In addition, the construction of harbor breakwaters, which impede the natural flow of sand down the coast, has contributed to the erosion. For example, most experts point to the construction in the 1940s and 1950s of the mile-long rock breakwater that guards Oceanside Harbor as the prime culprit for the erosion problems plaguing North County beach towns.

Moreover, some experts maintain that humankind, by building houses and condominiums on seaside bluffs, has stepped in the way of the ocean’s natural tug-of-war with the land. Construction of cement or boulder seawalls has limited erosion of coastal bluffs, robbing the shoreline of yet more sand.

“Every time someone armors the bluff, they’re cutting off a potential source of sand,” said Reinhard Flick, staff oceanographer for the state Department of Boating and Waterways.

But someday, the homeowners may pay. Officials have begun to question whether oceanfront dwellings may, as the years wear on, increasingly fall prey to the sea.

“In the long run, we’re probably fighting a losing battle,” said Scott Barnett, a Del Mar councilman. “In some places, we may end up with a situation like the East Coast, where the surf eventually reclaims the land.”

Perched on the cobbles at South Carlsbad State Beach one day recently, Mark Car reasoned that the ocean had already done a pretty good job of reclaiming the land.

Vacationing in the area with his wife, Debby, and two young sons, the commercial fisherman from Vancouver, Canada, went looking along the North County coast for a suitable stretch of sand. Finally, after several hours of finding nothing but rocks, the family gave up, bewildered, and plunked themselves down on a stony slope overlooking the waves.

“We were going to spend our vacation on the sandy beach in San Diego, but look at this,” Car said, picking up a cobble. “What can be done about this?”

Not everyone, however, dislikes the stones. Bob Yanagihara and Leslie McCarter spent one afternoon collecting cobbles at Ponto to create a Japanese garden at their cottage in Olivenhain. After flinging a few rocks in a wheelbarrow, the couple lay down in the cobbles for a break.

“I like the rocks,” said McCarter, 27. “They’ve got more character. And with the sand, it’s in your armpits, it’s in your clothes, its’s in everything you own. That gets old.”

Yanagihara, 25, looked at it more philosophically.

“You can’t do much about the currents of the ocean,” he said, squirming down amid the cobbles. “The sand is going. And if the ocean is going to bring stones, we have to lay on stones.”