Pescadero Memories

(Image: John Vonderlin’s collection of debris found at ‘Invisible Beach.’)

It was not long after the mystery of the tags was solved, while on another pebble and driftwood gathering trip–that we encountered a new mystery to consider.

There were a sizable number of marine debris objects spread along the beach from the colored pebble gravel bank south for about fifty yards and higher up the beach mixed with a thin layer of wrack. There were a number of black strips and rings of what seemed to be parts of inner tubes.

There were numerous balls of fishing line of many sizes interlaced with small twigs. There were golf balls and their remnants, tie wraps, aluminum can remnants, the top portions of plastic bottles, plastic caps, a handful of shoe soles, particularly kayak footwear, a few heels, halves of naked tennis balls, fishing lures, fishing line spools, socks and rags overgrown with seaweed, Frisbee aero rings, sunglasses, lighters, strips of tire treads, bits of colored plastic from both recognizable and unrecognizable sources, and a number of miscellaneous bits of litter.

To see such a concentrated collection of litter on the normally clean beaches of San Mateo, was both disturbing and fascinating. For it to be composed primarily of objects I had rarely if ever seen before on the local beaches was a real head-scratcher.

With these new mysteries presenting themselves, how could I do anything but begin collecting this cornucopia of weirdness? So I did.

Why this all showed up here, seemingly at once, and where it had come from turned out to be more difficult and more interesting mysteries to solve then that posed by “The Contender.” tags.

The last three photos are of most of the debris recovered in one trip and represents a typical “good” haul. End Part 1 Enjoy. John Vonderlin

By John Vonderlin

So, while I now knew where the tags had come from, I didn’t understand why they continued to show up over such a long time.

Had they been floating around out there all this time, with a few occasionally being washed ashore at this beach? That seemed unlikely. It was only when we noticed that at the far northern stretch of the beach, just above the gravel bank that had the colorful pebbles in it, that there was a sizable pile of wrack mixed with gravel and sand, that things started to come clear.

Wrack is seaweed pulled loose from its mooring and piled high on the beach by storms or the high tide wave action. In the top layer of the wrack we found a few partially concealed tags, as well as other litter. Digging around we found a few more.

A light bulb went off,

It seemed fairly obvious that the tags had floated in, become buried in the wrack and gravel pile, then as high tide wave action had eaten at the pile over the weeks, the tags that had been buried were being intermittently released, to eventually move further south, where we had been finding them. We considered the mystery solved.

I’ve attached photos of my collection of tags, mainly gathered from Invisible Beach. Some however were subsequently found as far south as Bradley Beach, at the Santa Cruz/San Mateo County line. The next picture is of the last one found nearly two years later, far to the north at Tunitas Beach.

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Intrigued, I did an Internet search and discovered the sad truth behind their presence on the beach. Here’s the short story of the ill-fated boat, “The Contender.”

From: District 11 Public Affairs Press Release

“Coast Guard Station Golden Gate with the help of Good Samaritan vessels rescued 28 people today after their vessel sank five miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“At approximately 2:30 p.m. today, the Contender, a 49-foot chartered fishing vessel, home ported in Emeryville, Calif., placed an emergency radio call to Coast Guard Group San Francisco to report they were taking on water off of Ocean Beach. A passenger onboard the vessel also placed a 911 call from his cell phone to the Coast Guard to report they were sinking.

“At 2:45 p.m., two 47-foot motor lifeboat crews from Station Golden Gate arrived on scene to find 28 people in the water wearing life jackets. With the response and assistance of several Good Samaritan vessels, all 28 people were rescued from the surf and transported to Station Golden Gate.

“The 24 rescued passengers and four crewmembers from the Contender received medical treatment for hypothermia at Station Golden Gate. One individual did not survive.”

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The next time I returned with a beachcombing friend it was a different story. While we didn’t find another sealed packet of the cards, we did find singletons here and there. We started making a game of it, calling out the numbers of the cards as we picked them up.

Every new number became a source of glee. Each repeated number’s excitement was modulated by its common-ness. Having scoured clean the beach and the vegetation above the swash zone, we figured our game was over, but kept our treasures as momentoes.

How wrong we were.

For some mysterious reason, the tags continued to show up at the beach in the following weeks. While the quantity encountered and the occurrence of new numbers decreased significantly, almost every trip produced a few.

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By John Vonderlin

Having been a Natural Wonder collector, photographer and admirer for years, it seemed logical to create dissonant art by combining objects from my collection with some of the disturbing and odd things I was finding. But that came later. Here’s what I consider the start.

My love affair with the non-buoyant debris of Invisible Beach, actually had its roots in the day I encountered some unusual flotsam there.

Flotsam is floating debris from a shipwreck, the more common sibling of jetsam, which is material thrown overboard to lighten the load of a boat in distress.

Viewing the flotsam, a plastic wrapped bundle of fish tags from a boat named, “The Contender,” as nothing more then odd beach litter, I picked it up and put it in my litter bag.

As I proceeded northward towards the pebbles and driftwood I was seeking, I found many more of the loose, business-card-sized, plastic-like fish tags with a variety of different numbers on them. I remember entertaining momentarily the idea of trying to contact the boat’s owner and complain about their carelessness. Instead I threw them all in a trash can before I drove away.

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By John Vonderlin

While the pretty pebbles and unusual driftwood chucked up on the shore at Invisible Beach, by Neptune’s Vomitorium, hinted at an interesting story, it was the manmade non-buoyant marine debris that was regurgitated there that came to obsess me.

Over the last three years I’ve spent thousands of dollars and maybe a thousand hours gathering it, washing it, untangling it, photographing it, sorting it, then eventually arranging some of it in a myriad of ways into hundreds of pieces of generally whimsical art.

I ended up with what I believe is the most bizarre and largest collection of non-buoyant marine debris in the world. Hey! No snickering, please.

Nearly every trip to Invisible Beach not only added to my growing collection, but offered some new mystery that required pondering or researching. Through observation and my collecting, various rhythms, patterns, clusters and cycles of deposition revealed themselves, usually hazily, unfortunately.

I formed theories, made guesses, tested hypotheses, discarding some of them, as I gathered ever more information as well as debris. It was as if this odd spot was allowing me to Moses-like, part the sea that was hiding the out-of-sight-out-of-mind ugliness of our careless usage of the ocean as a trashcan.

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Other Murders–Here’s where I go back in time to bring to light other murders, extremely few in number, that occurred in Pescadero. The details, the stories from the old newspapers, give readers a feeling for what the town was like.

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The killing of Melvin Parsons in January of 1857 came to light in a letter sent to the ‘San Francisco Herald.’

1857: “…we learn that a man named Melvin Parsons was shot there [Pescadero]…by a man named Besse or Baden. The latter keeps a store, and about four o’clock on Wednesday morning, Parsons and some other went there and requested to have the door opened, as they wanted to go in and get something to drink. Besse refused them. Parsons put his head down to a crack in the house and asked for some whiskey, stating their willingness to pay for it. At this moment he was shot dead with a rifle by somebody inside, supposed to be Besse. Whether Besse fired under an apprehension of being robbed, or on account of an old feud, we are not informed.”

The killing of Thomas Marrion in 1862 was reported in the “Marysville Daily Appeal,” hundreds of miles away from the village of Pescadero.

“Thomas Marrion, a native of England, was murdered in Pescadero, Santa Cruz County…by a Mexican Ramon Larria by name. It appears that Marrion went to Larria’s house at night and was never seen again alive, but his mangled body was found in the creek. Larria fled but was caught and lynched by the people, as is supposed, his body being found hanging in an old stable.”

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From the “Half Moon Bay Review & Pescadero Pebble,” 1957

“Construction work has started on the long awaited $2,000,000 Campbell Soup Company mushroom plant at Gazos Creek, south of Pescadero.

“The plant, originally announced two years ago, will be the largest mushroom production center west of the Mississippi river.

“Nearly 100 employees will be required to tend the 10 buildings where the fungus buttons are to be grown.

“John Bolles, San Francisco architect who designed the project will supervise construction which should be completed before the end of the year, according to company officials.

“Members of the various Pescadero boards see this as a boon not only in payrolls but in added assessed valuation, thereby meaning more on the tax rolls.

“Mrs. Cathleen Allen, retiring High School board chairman stated that this would certainly ease the ever increasing tax burden on the private citizen. ‘This, added industry and payrolls, are what we need,’ she declared.

“The property right off Coast Highway at Gazos Creek, was purchased several years ago and work has long been anticipated. However, the company first hit a water company that delayed the project.”

(Photo by John Vonderlin)

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