The shipwreck Point Estero

I talked to my sister the other day, and she asked me what the heck happened to the blog.

“It’s like you dropped off the face of the earth!” she said.

Well…I guess she’s kinda right. I started GoGoTacoNegro so that our friends and family could track our adventures, and for a while there, those were fast and furious. But since we settled in San Luis Obispo in October and have spent the ensuing time trying to find jobs, it seems like my biggest escapades involve Costco on Saturday afternoons.

Ah, that’s not exactly true. I’ve been volunteering at the Estrella Warbirds Museum, up in Paso Robles.

The UH-34D helicopter I helped to restore (which I wrote about here) even had a big rollout and dedication on February 17th.

Michael’s been recovering from his knee surgery on January 25th, and I have to say, that was so routine as to not even be blog-able. He’s finally easing back into CrossFit and other things.

The other thing that’s been taking up a lot of my time is trail running. See, like a crazy person, I signed up for my (first-ever!) ultramarathon: The Tar Springs Ranch Ultra, which takes place in Arroyo Grande on April 7th. The distance? 50k.

Because I’m crazy.

Luckily there are a good amount of trails here in the SLO area. But I don’t exactly bring my good camera when I’m out for a run.  At any rate – that’s an adventure for another post. As in, a post that will appear some time after April 7th.

But I do want to get back to blogging! I miss it. So even though we’re pretty much stationary here in SLO (we have jobs now and everything!) that doesn’t mean the adventures are over. Not by a long shot. Sometimes I just need to remind myself of that fact.

To that end, let’s talk about the Point Estero, a commercial fishing boat that ran aground just north of the town of Cayucos back at the end of July 2017. You can read all about it here, but the end result is that the ship has not been removed, and there are no plans to remove it.

I first saw pictures of the Point Estero on Instagram. I follow a photographer named Nic Stover, and @stoverphoto put up this awesome starry-night photo with the boat in the foreground. I told Michael I’d love to find that ship and take that photograph, but that’s about as far as it went.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, we went on a little sight-seeing excursion up to Cayucos. It’s been called the last authentic beach town on the Central Coast and I have to agree. The beach there is fabulous and the have a cute little downtown area. It’s also home to the Brown Butter Cookie Company. Let me tell you, the brown butter-sea salt cookies are delicious.

We also stopped in a little shop called McLean Jewelry and got to chatting with the lady working there. We talked about San Luis Obispo and Cayucos, Oregon (where she’s from), and then… she asked us if we’d been out to the shipwreck yet.

Turns out the site is not even five minutes from town. It’s right on the edge of Estero Bluffs State Park, and you can hike down to it. We went out to check it out that afternoon and I immediately made a plan. The ship was just so easy to get to! I wanted to come back out and photograph it at sunset.

Then, the stars aligned last Saturday. We’d had rain for the previous couple of days but the skies were mostly clear that afternoon. Low tide for the area was around 5pm. Sunset was around 6.

I was almost giddy as I packed up my camera. I hadn’t had a photography adventure in what seemed like forever. We loaded Bailey up into the truck and headed to Cayucos around 4:15.

The light was actually pretty perfect right when we got there – that golden hour before sunset.

After checking out the ship for a bit, Michael took Bailey off to run on the beach so that I could go to work.

BOOM. Perfect lighting. A little breezy, but how could I complain? As I mentioned earlier, low tide was at roughly 5pm, and the water was so low you could actually board the ship. Which I did. Most of it is intact, but the bottom is full of water and sand. This vessel isn’t going anywhere – until the sea starts to break it up, anyway.

As the sun sank lower, I realized a bit of a mistake in the “sunset” part of my idea. See, the ship is actually in this wee cove – and that meant it was hidden from the final 30 minutes of the setting sun.

Undeterred, I fired away with my camera, moving a couple of times along the rocks to find different angles. I managed to not slip on seaweed but I did learn that stepping on an anemone will cause them to shoot water at you. Good to know, right?

Man, I miss landscape photography. Conditions were just a little too breezy – the mast would have reflected better in still water – but I still love this image.

My favorite part is that since this ship isn’t going anywhere, I have more time to go back any try again. Sunset, sunrise, starry nights…. the Point Estero and I are just getting started.