10-day - san miguel island - holga shots

This is what I woke up to our first morning on San Miguel...I don't think I need to say anything else:

San Miguel is pretty lunar and we had to get up and go for a hike. As we got higher on the island, our view got better, and with the powdery white sand beach and bottom of san mig's beautiful Cuyler Harbor, the color of the water was incredible. We hiked up to the caliche forest, which is a graveyard of stumps petrified in salt - very strange, indeed.

The island itself is a trip. There are no trees (that we saw). Most of the plant life looks desert ish and dead. There are subtle rolling hills up to cliff edges that drop into the sea. And there are lines of sand that go across the whole island from northwest to southeast...yes, it's a striped island. Really there's too much to describe, soo:

hiking up from cuyler

the mighty caliche forest

hiking back to the beach

We dove a bit on san migs. The water was nice and clear and calm. We ended up staying for 4 days total, 2 of which had glassy mornings. Ross speared a rockfish. We found some cliff jumps, cruised some tide pools, and had a national geographic moment with this hidden pool full of elephant seals...truly magical!

vicious!

sweet sweet corsair!

nice dive

elephant seal day spa

tidepooling on a rock about 1/4 mile off shore

pretty colors - no, that's not stained glass

So San Miguel was definitely a National Geographic destination...and it's right off our coast. I know that we got really lucky in terms of weather and timing, but damn! them islands are something else.

more to come...