| Cable Crossing |
| While walking on the beach one day several years ago, at Montana de Oro, the State Park just to the west of Los Osos, I came across a large sign that said “Cable Crossing.” Having spent a significant portion of my youth on the beaches of Puget Sound in Washington State, I was quite familiar with these signs and their significance. Most of the Puget Sound islands and many of its peninsulas have at least one such installation. The islands are tied to the telephone network and the power grid via underwater cables. The large warning signs are posted to protect the cables from being snagged by boat anchors and fishing nets. Never having to worry about either anchors or nets, I’ve pretty much ignored these warning other than wonder about their existence.
So, finding this sign on the ocean beach in the middle of nowhere didn’t even register until later. I got to thinking about this cable – where could it possibly be going. There are no islands off the Central Coast, except Hawaii. Hawaii is quite away south. There are no apparent support buildings or structures around the cable crossing - the crossing is in the middle of a state park. The cable crossing remained an imponderable until we bought a navigation chart (map) of Morro Bay. Nancy suggested that it would be fun to have a navigational chart of Morro Bay on the wall in the entry hall. This became a quest and we started to look for such a device. We started with all the various gift shops along the Embarcadero and a sampling of the various shops around town that featured eclectic merchandize. Mostly, what we got was blank stares. At the Harbor Festival, in early October, the Coast Guard had an information booth - since the festival was right in front of the Coast Guard Station, this seemed reasonable. I asked the guy at the table where I could get a chart of the bay and he didn’t hesitate giving me an email address: www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/staff/charts.htm. They had exactly what we wanted. Once we had the chart and installed on the hall wall and the novelty had warn off, it occur to me to look to find the cable crossing. What a surprise! There were eight different cables listed for Montana de Oro. The chart didn’t tell me where they were going – only that there was a whole mess of them, and, a several more out of San Luis Obispo Bay. Obviously these cables are for communication – sending power across the ocean wouldn’t make sense. At one time the next step would have be difficult and required a fair amount of academic research, but today the Internet makes finding information on these cable crossing easier. I found a neat map that shows all the various cable crossings, but I couldn’t copy it to this document. But, I can link you to it: http://eyeball-series.org/cablew-eyeball.htm. It’s hard to get very excited about such an important feature that is buried, out of sight, and out of mind. But, I saw in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago somebody was going to string a new cable through Montana de Oro to somewhere under the sea. This installation doesn’t promise to be very interesting – just a ditch. The only impact that this is likely to have on the locals might be a partial closing of the road for a couple of days. But, the impact on the world is profound. The other day I called a friend, Rob, on his cell phone. I got Rob’s answering machine and asked him to call me back – no hurry. The next day, Rob called back and we talked for a couple of minutes about trivial matters and then he mentioned that he was calling from China. The signal was so clear that I would have swore that he was next door and the price low enough that it wasn’t a consideration to the content of the call. There are several miracles of communication in place that might have made this kind of call possible. One might be the transpacific cable routed right here through Morro Bay. It is amazing how jaded we’ve become to our world. The installation of the new cable did cause a bit of excitement. Not because of the digging of the ditch, but because of the offshore activity. There is a parking lot at Montana de Oro’s north end that allows access to the sand dunes that form the western boundary of Morro Bay. I visited this site one day and discovered a new manhole in the middle of the parking lot. A crew was very busy down hole setting up some sort of transition between the underground and the underwater. Once the shore side transition was well underway, a large white ship, the Global Sentinel, appeared offshore. The ship was, as expected, the cable layer. The unexpected aspect of the cable ship showing up was the amount of time it lay at anchor offshore of the attachment point – it was there for at least a month. Because of the coastal marine layer, the ship was partly in the fog and would hover at the edge of visibility. For those locals who had missed the newspaper announcement of the cable laying or who had forgotten; the ship became a mystery – it didn’t move, except to disappear into the fog – it was well lit at night and there was a new bell clanging all night. There isn’t much large ship travel in and out of Moro Bay, particularly in the middle of the winter, so the cable operations did offer some entertainment. One other thing before we leave this whole cable subject. When we lived in Bristol, England, a local hero was a man named Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859). Burnel was a engineer, entrepreneur and inventor who revolutionized the transportation system of England and the world. Among his many achivements, he built one of the first trains in England -- London to Bristol and on to Plymouth. He invented and built the first steamship (the SS Great Britain) to cross the Atlantic without sails. He later built several other steamships in Bristol. One was the SS Great Eastern. The Great Eastern was the largest ship in the world at the time (so large that once built in Bristol, it could never return). The Great Eastern was so large that no one could figure out what to do with it until it came time to cross the Atlantic with a transatlantic cable, 1865. The Great Eastern was large enough to carry enough cable to make the crossing possible. 2006 was the bicentary of Brunel’s birth and there was considerable focus on him while we were there. One of the major features of our time in Bristol was the celebration of this historical person. |
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