So time flies and a decade has passed since our last visit with Mahdee to SoCal and San Diego Bay in particular. We arrived in SoCal last fall and wandered familiar anchorages from peaceful Santa Cruz Island to Newport Beach Harbor’s postage stamp anchorage at the end of Lido Island and then to San Diego’s “cruisers anchorage” for a bit before Mahdee’s trip to Ensenada and our haulout at Baja Naval. We stopped in at the USCG customs dock aka “Police Dock” or Public Dock for inspection and obtaining a permit to the cruisers anchorage. While there we noticed there were very few boats in the slips adjacent the inspection area and the lively boating scene was quiet. Strange.
We returned to that dock a few times over the winter as it is one of the more convenient places for boaters to use the pumpout, get water, or drop off recycling trash items. It’s conveniently on the way from the La Playa anchorage back to the cruisers anchorage. We note that we haven’t found other public trash dumpsters that include recycling. Each time we’ve visited that dock we again notice that the nearby slips are strangely void of both boats and boaters.
Last month it really clicked — for logistics reasons we needed to at a dock rather than anchor or mooring for a day or two and none of the local yacht clubs that we have reciprocals with had guest dock space for us on a busy weekend. So we stayed in a slip at what they now call the “guest dock” rather than the public dock. The prices have increased from a flat rate that used to be as little as $10 – $20 for small boats and $20 or $30 for the bigger ones like Mahdee and amenities included water, power, clean restrooms and hot showers. Now there is a per-foot rate of $1.27/ft/day, amenities still include water and power but no showers and what was once clean is now a filthy restroom that seems to be frequented by the homeless community (bring your own TP).
No wonder boaters no longer use the police dock. What was once a part of the vibrant boating community is now just an overpriced place for boaters without connections or resources to berth elsewhere. The check in and check out times used to be in the morning — checkout was by 10 am as I recall but there was a lot of flexibility for boaters to get into the open slips as early as possible in the mornings. This was partially errand-running driving and partially the desire to get into the slips during the early morning calms rather than the mid-day cross winds. Strangely, the checkin and checkout times of the slips are now 1pm and 11am respectively. As if parking a boat is similar to staying in a hotel? Checking in at 1pm makes absolutely NO sense to a boater whose primary reason for visiting a transient slip is to run errands or logistics-related activities that often mean the boat remaining at the dock from early in the morning until the sun sets. The check in times mean a boater will pay for two days rather than one in order to get a full day at the dock. I’d often thought of the Port of San Diego and associated Harbor Police as being, well, out of touch with reality but this is just further proof of it. No clue.
In the past we’d really enjoyed meeting a variety of cruisers and local boaters there at the public dock and I’m saddened by the present condition of the facility as well as the breakup of the boating community that had congregated around these temporary slips. There are plenty of San Diego boaters engaging in the San Diego Samba but the welcome resource of the public dock is no longer the place it once was.
