Anacapa

Years ago I ran away to sea. I expected ocean liners to be lining up at Portsmouth or Southampton on the south coast of England, in need of ships' pursers. I was hopelessly naive and decades late. The only boat I found was the ferry to the Isle of Wight. I climbed aboard, and then a bus as far south as it would take me. My voyage to sea took me as far as a holiday apartment in Ventnor with views out across the water. I rented the apartment from a retired antiques dealer who was leading a successful life in the house above, writing soft core porn.
I gazed out at the ocean and wrote my latest novel (though I was still very much unpublished). Tennyson ghosts the island, and Turgenev used to swim off the shore at Ventnor so I was in some writerly tradition.
Living alone and staring out at sea rendered me rather loony however. Seaviews and isolation are exceptionally fine, but best played in short bursts if you want a balanced life in the world.

Our trip out off the California coast last week, from the city of Ventura out to Anacapa, was my first to these Channel Islands. As a day trip it was perfect. Anacapa, the most southerly, is just a mile and half long, its name stemming from a native American term for mirage. Ice plants, pink-flowered succulents, now mat the island after their introduction in the 1930s, but we were there too for the blooming of the yellow coreopsis.
The islands are known by some as North America's Galapagos, thanks to the nutrients that bubble up from the seabed to feed a wide range of life. We were there in the nesting season of Western gulls - 4,000 pairs making it the world's largest such nesting colony. I'm used to the gulls of Plymouth sharing the city centre. It was a privilege instead to be sharing these birds' more natural territory for a while, gulls settling down into the same square footage of land they'll know for the thirty-odd years of their lives.
One portion of the island is off-limits to people for ten months of the year, being the nesting site for the endangered brown pelicans. (Those pictured here have strayed close to the lighthouse.) I've watched these skimming the waves, plunging for fish, or standing like day visitors from primeval times on the pier at Santa Barbara. Their breeding here is a success story. Years ago a chemical plant onshore pumped DDT into the oceans. This rendered the shells of the pelicans' eggs so thin they cracked when the pelicans stood on them to begin the hatching process. It took decades before the poisons lessened enough to allow populations to regrow.
A day among the birdlife, sounds of birdcalls and surf and winds and the barking of sealions, is just enough of an island day to wash away some of the insane aspects we've forced into human existence. Our boat motored through the Channel, keeping pace with a grey whale, calling out in wonder at each spume from its blowhole, before we were loaded back onto the mainland and disgorged into our separate cars.