I posted a bit ago about how we’d gone back to Shaw’s Cove for the first time in five years. Part of that was because we’d visited La Jolla Shores on one day down and back trips in 2020 and 2021. Then no swimming at all anywhere in 2022 or 2023.

So while it had been five years since we visited Laguna, it had been only three for La Jolla. However, both our last two visits had been overcast with cloudy water and a limited time in it.

This time conditions were a bit better, at least on top of the waves.

Once we’d endured the 3.5 hour 115 mile drive (easier with radar assisted cruise, trust me) we hit the beach around 12:30 and the sun never let up. Our friends had said they were leaving at 11:30 from Ventura, we figured they’d get to the beach later in the afternoon. Unfortunately they let us know around 1 that they were just then leaving, so we wouldn’t see them until tomorrow.

So I spent about two hours in the water, broken up by opportunities to sit in the sand with Sam and eat more rice crispy treats (among other things).

The sharks weren’t hard to find and the first one I saw gave me a bit of a jolt. Having seen so many baby leopard sharks recently at Shaw’s Cove I forgot just how bit their parents are.

I also found lots of shovelnose guitarfish, more so than any other creature down there.

That said, photos would be a struggle since the wave energy was high, the water was sandy, and the adult sharks are smarter and faster than their kids, they usually snake away long before you can get close enough to count their spots.

And the people. I was practically alone at Picnic Cove hunting for baby sharks in the tall grass, but la Jolla has snorkelers, kayakers, bodyboarders, and bumbling not so good swimmers in life jackets…all dragging their feet or shadows between me and the fearful fish.

After packing up for the day and washing off the equipment we went to an EVgo charger in Clairemont Mesa near our hotel to top up. We used only about 40% of the (65kwh) battery getting to the beach, but didn’t want to chance anything on the way home and also still have credit on the EVgo card that came with the car and expires next year. The chargers were in a shopping mall, so we ate dinner outside while waiting. We’d learned at LAX last December that Jersey Mike’s actually has a gluten free sub option made with rice flour. Sam was already craving beef (as usual) so we got cheesesteaks at Mike’s and ate them outside.

Back at the hotel the night would sour. We spotted roaches here and there and eventually realized they were breeding inside the bedside alarm clock. Oh, and there wasn’t any shampoo or soap. So…cool. There wasn’t a sub $500 hotel room available in the county and we doubted changing rooms would make a difference so we killed as many of the bugs as we could find (they were breeding in there so there were a lot of tiny nymphs too), put all our electronics in zip-lock bags, made sure everything else was back in our luggage, and tried to get some sleep.

At check-out the hotel (the ironically named Pleasant Inn) guy looked at our bug photos, shrugged, and said “sorry bout that.”

We couldn’t even drink the free coffee in the room because we’d seen another roach scatter away from the coffee maker the evening before when we opened the fridge.

But all that nastiness behind us we went to join the stadium seating at La Jolla Shores. Just like Shaw’s Cove at some point after Biden preemptively and incorrectly declared COVID was “over” the appeal of La Jolla must have hit TikTok. An influx of cheap and easy to operate beach canopies at the same time culminated in a beach scene so immensely cluttered that you could barely see the water from our little “obstructed view” nosebleed seats.

Soon enough our friends joined us for a few hours both at the beach and in the water. Oh, and I forgot to mention the water was unusually warm even for this time of year. With ambient water temperature at 74 degrees there were warmer shallows that felt like Hawaii. And by Sunday some of the wave energy had abated too, allowing me to spend more time finding sharks and other things like a California Lobster.

We started packing up around 4pm, stopped at Fish 101 Leucadia in Encinitas (outdoor picnic tables) on the way home for dinner and made it to the garage around 7:30. However, since we averaged around 72mph we used up more of the battery (EVs use more power per mile at high speeds than low speeds) proving that we’d really have been pushing it if we didn’t top up down in La Jolla. However, for all the naysayers, even at GM’s reduced throughput of 50kw/hr, the “top up” I’m referring to put ~25 miles of range in could have been accomplished in less than ten minutes if we weren’t also planning to eat dinner simultaneously. We could have made it all the way home without charging in theory, maybe… but you know how risk averse I am.

UPDATE: At 1am on Tuesday morning I woke up with pain in my left ear. I ended up taking advil to go back to sleep. By the end of the day it wasn’t getting better so I called the doctor, who diagnosed (although this is dicey over the phone) “swimmer’s ear.” I’d never heard of such a thing until I started frantically googling symptoms at 1:30am the night before. Some online advice is “it’ll go away on its own in a few days” and other advice was “if you don’t put antibiotics in there it’ll spread to the base of your skull and cause permanent hearing loss.” The doctor seemed to think it was more the former, but tall tales on Reddit of folks with unbearable childbirth-like pain sitting outside of doctors’ offices until they open up to get steroid shots to quell the pain of swimmer’s ear had me spooked, so when he offered the antibiotics I accepted.

However, because I selected delivery by mail, I’m only going to get them tonight (Friday). The pain isn’t as bad now, but it’s still there. I’ve only really taken pain relievers at night, and only 200mgs at that, not the 800 every 8 hours the doctor suggested. The best way to describe it is a feeling of pressure from a flight coupled with someone just constantly pressing a bruise inside your ear canal. (Speaking of which, I’ll be on a flight a week from now, so I’m more than a little worried that if this thing isn’t totally cleared up, or if it left behind some kind of weakness of the drum, my eardrums will pop and produce incredible pain… we’ll see….)

How did this happen after an adult lifetime (so far) of not getting an ear infection and going snorkeling all over the world multiple times a year? The sudden susceptibility to infection is a hallmark of COVID immune system damage. Also I should note that my body still hasn’t “cleared” the virus or at least the damage it did; I still experience fatigue in situations I didn’t pre-infection and have some sort of lingering phlem or liquid or something in my lungs. That said, I snorkeled at Laguna two weeks prior with no ear or infection issues.

However, there’s an outlier here: that night in the roach motel? I had stuffed earplugs in there for the entire night, not because I was worried about roach nymphs making a home in my moist ear passages (this was Sam’s first thought when I said I had ear pain!), but because traffic on Clairemont Mesa Blvd was so loud inside the room. I’m reading now that Swimmer’s Ear is common in folks who spend “a lot” (whatever that means) of time in the ocean, but can also be caused by getting any water in the ear and then blocking canal from drying, which I did that night. I can’t remember if I’d worn earplugs after swimming on any other trip, but I probably was in the water more than I have been for years, and then worn earplugs longer afterwards (usually I’d wait a few hours until it was clear the noise was preventing sleep, but last weekend I just knew the noise would suck so I put them in as soon as I hit the sheets).

So I:

1. weakened my immune system with COVID
2. exposed my ear canals to multiple hours of oceanic bacteria
3. trapped the water/bacteria in the ear canal for 8 hours
   • also, the earplugs were previously used by me, so there may have been bacteria riding on those that was looking for a nice moist place to call home as well, or ganged up with the ocean boys gang, or who knows…
4. introduced even more bacteria by staying in the ocean even longer
5. maybe swirled the bacteria into microcuts by twirling a Q-tip. I don’t remember if I used one Sunday or Monday, but it’s possible, and apparently a very very bad idea if you’ve got water and/or bacteria in there.

This update is a bit presumptive since I haven’t taken the antibiotics yet, but I assume by next week this’ll all be literally cleared up. Definitely going to get swimming plugs for next year’s adventures, though.

Another thing I started this year (in Maui) for prevention is just wearing a long-sleeve sun shirt under my wetsuit the entire day. It keeps me warmer while I’m in the water, and more protected before/after I take the wetsuit off (sunscreen always sweats off me within minutes no matter what).