The City is announcing that street sweeping routes will once again be enforced. Beginning on Wednesday, July 15, posted routes will again be enforced by citations. Talk about a sign of the return of “normalcy.”

The above letters were being left on windshields through parts of OB.

The public’s help is being sought in finding the driver in an Ocean Beach hit-and-run that killed skateboarder Cameron “Cam” Loren. Loren was struck from behind as he skateboarded down Voltaire Street.

This was June 4 and he was hit in the 4500 block of Voltaire around 10:30 pm. His body was found by a passerby.

San Diego police said the driver fled the scene, leaving the 25-year-old Loren on the street with injuries. Emergency crews responded to the incident, but Loren was declared dead at the scene, according to police.

Volunteer Board Grapples With How to Fill Vacant Seats

By Geoff Page

It is interesting to see the lengths people are going to today, in their efforts to establish a modicum of normalcy. The reasons for this are varied. For many it is a serious worry about money. For some, who may not have a money worry, it is a chance to get back to making more money. And some, like many celebrities out there in front of laptops, are starving for attention.

The volunteers on the Peninsula Community Planning Board want to resume their business, which has been on hold since their last meeting in February of this year. While it may not be the motive for everyone, most of the sitting members expressed the same sentiment, a genuine concern that the work for the community the board normally does was not getting done.

The kick-off effort to restart their work, Thursday, June 18, was an on-line meeting using used a popular on-line meeting software called Zoom.

Beginning today, Tuesday, June 9, the Ocean Beach Pier, beach parking lots and boardwalks reopen.

Social – or physical – distancing still needs to be practiced by beachgoers. This means people should only sit near people whom they live with.

by Bob Edwards

This past Saturday, May 30th, I was looking at the Cabrillo National Monument web page to see if there was any news about a future reopening. To my surprise I found the following information under “Alerts Now In Effect”:

“Outdoors areas and restrooms at Cabrillo National Monument are open from 9 am to 5 pm.

We are working to increase access to the park in a phased approach. Outdoors areas and restrooms are open from 9 am to 5 pm. Indoor facilities such as the Lighthouse, Visitor Center, and some exhibits remain closed.?The tidepools close at 4:30 pm.”

I usually walk the Bayside Trail a few times a month and have been really missing it, so I immediately hopped in the car with my wife, drove up to Catalina Blvd., and headed out past the cemetery to the monument. (As a side note, I just found out that there are 101,000 souls interred at Ft. Rosecrans Cemetery. That also happens to be the number of people who have died of Covid-19 in the USA as of this weekend.)

by Kathy Blavatt

May has brought out various shades of pink in my garden. These cheery blossoms nicely contrast with the green foliage, and blues skies that peek through as the gray burns off through the morning’s May gray.

The growth in my garden has been spectacular.

By Joni Halpern

We have just completed our Mother’s Day celebration without the traditional reliance on buying power to attest to our love of the women who have mothered us. We have sent online deliveries if we could and zoomed ourselves with varied success into the two-dimensional spaces of each other’s screens. We have texted, phoned, and snail-mailed our greetings. But we have not been able to hug.

How unexpectedly descriptive is the absence of a hug, for in not being available, it emphasizes the importance of an embrace. Two arms wrapped around us, pulling us closer to a loving heart, a gesture that could impart power and conflict, for it often occurs between two beings of varying strength. And yet our surrender to a hug is a relief, a comfort, an admission that we persist in life’s most strenuous endeavors because we are loved.

On the other side of a hug is the fact that we concede our need for others.

The Ocean Beach Planning Board will hole its regularly scheduled monthly meeting tonight, May 6 – and it will be held electronically. Interested persons need to pre-register for the meeting – details below. As usual, the meeting will start at 6 pm.

On the agenda is a Budget Request Revision as the city has reprioritized its fiscal year 2012 budget due to budget shortfalls from the COVID-19 crisis. The Board is set to review and prioritize its own budget goals.

There’s a Park’s Master Plan to review and make recommendations upon also on tap. For the “Slow Streets Initiative”, the Board is also supposed to put together a map of possible routes it could follow.

The last Action item is the establishment of an “Ad Hoc Committee” to go over recommendations regarding short-term vacation rentals regulations.

Register for the Meeting

For several nights now, there’s been bumper-to-bumper traffic and crowds at Sunset Cliffs – with many people trying to to catch bioluminescent waves in the ocean.

Problem is – according to news reports – people are not practicing social or physical distancing and many are not wearing masks.

Neighbors are also complaining about the traffic and crowds. Cars are circulating trying to find parking – but the small mini-lots are closed.

by Joaquin Antique

I tried to get up in time for the 6:05 AM sunrise and beach reopening but overslept. By the time I walked down to Dog Beach, the sun had been up for an hour though you couldn’t see any sunlight as Coastal Eddy was in town.

Ran into some guys schlepping their boards down Voltaire and spoke to them briefly. They were jonesing to get out in the water after a month of no surfing and smiling ear to ear.

“How was it?” they asked a dude who had just come out of the water. “Wet”, he replied in a jaded tone of voice. I guess some people are just glass-half-empty at seven in the morning. Still, he was the only person on the beach that I saw today that didn’t have a smile on his face.

Between the jetty and the pier I counted about 70-80 people in the water and more were arriving by the minute. The parking lots remain closed and most of the people seemed to be locals walking down. I did see a few people parking on the street as close as they could get to the beach.