Santa Catalina Island

And he practiced, they found him dead at his desk.

And here you're the same age as Dolly Parton, and you could own Catalina Island, you could be drinking a Mai Tai this morning, but every day I've ever come here, you're the first guy here, you're in a suit and tie.

I mean, this is, talk about, this is truly the love of your

life.

That's going to connect Jarvis to the jungle.

It's inspired by one of my favorite places on the planet, Catalina Island.

There's a flat bypass that's going to take you around the epic KOM, for anybody who wants to skip the climb, to Watopia.

two crit style circuits.

I'm somebody who enjoys the new scenery.

So yeah, looking forward to it.

Have you ever heard of Catalina Island before? I feel like that's sort of a regional thing in the States.

Yeah, I've never come across it before.

Eventually, she swam the same churning stretch of water both ways, the first woman to accomplish this feat.

As a girl, Florence had often looked towards Catalina Island from the San Diego area where she grew up and thought about swimming the 26-mile shark-infested waters.

On July 4, 1951, she made the attempt.

The distance wasn't the problem.

Now, once upon a time, and the reason I think I call it this is I used to be a more regular scuba diver.

I'm not doing it so much now, but back when I g- learned and I got certified, I learned in the kelp beds here around Southern California, places like Catalina Island and the Channel Islands, places like that.

And diving here in Southern California, you have to be careful as a diver in those spaces 'cause they're full of kelp, that you don't get entangled in the kelp and the seaweed, which could sort of wrap around you and get you stuck, which would be scary under the water, and you had to not panic and be skilled enough to disentangle yourself or cut yourself out of the kelp or have your dive buddy help you out, which is why it's important to not dive alone.

So that's where this, this original vision came to me.

And start our family fairly, fairly quickly after that.

So i uh i did spend after high school i went my dad was a live aboard sailing so we went sailing for kind of my gift for graduating high school and then when i came back that ended up lasting quite a while because i i ended up getting off the boat in catalina island and after our two weeks of sailing i ended up spending the whole summer working on catalina island at the two harbors resort it was easy an easy transition because i had been working in a the grocery store for the little market for most of my high school term uh i took a job at the uh at the island working in the little store there and i did that until um i did that until october and i left the i left catalina i want to say i left catalina because i was going to take a job with the bureau of land management of all things as a firefighter The piece I didn't tell you is I also was a volunteer fireman all through high school.

I worked for the California Department of Forestry back then before it was Cal Fire at Station 7 in Riverside County.

And so I was trying to get hired as a fireman.

He even constructed his own 14-foot dory, which is a small unducked boat at the age of 17 that he used to sail to the Santa Iglesias.

Catalina Island and Thomas was a really hard worker at his core like he believed in right and wrong but he also believed in second chances and like that people can change but if this brief history about Thomas teaches you anything that I've given you so far let it be that once he put his mind to something like that was that.

After high school, he joined the military serving in the Vietnam War.

And then he would go to work with the Air Force as an Air Force security police officer, then a firefighter and even a probation officer, which was like kind of what he did for the longest amount of time.

it's not.

No more.

and they shared the great news with their family on November 10th Thomas spoke to one of his sons and Jackie spoke to some of her friends being like okay like we found someone who's gonna buy it we're you know the well-deserved we wanted to go to someone who like will actually you know be able to enjoy it so uh after meeting with them like we feel a lot better anyways what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this uh the boat out for one last hoorah we're gonna go out to Santa Catalina Santa Catalina Island and Catalina

Wine Mixer

So that's why I wanted to do this episode for you today.

First, a bit of background about the Santa Catalina San Pedro Channel, which is where I focused a lot of my research.

This is quite a large stretch of water.

It starts on the north end around the Santa Barbara area, the Channel Islands, and moves all the way south past Rancho Palos Verdes to about San Clemente.

and i wasn't i tried calling the coast guard and the radio was dead so this is a really good case involving electromagnetic effects this clearly was not a submarine they don't travel right beneath boats certainly at that depth and they don't affect compasses and radios and depth sounders all of which malfunctioned in his case At this point, the object moved away and left the witness pretty traumatized and frightened.

A later check on his equipment revealed that the compass mountings were actually broken.

And as the witness says... was weird i was just too goddamned petrified to move and this keeps happening in case after case when people see these usos particularly in this area the santa catalina san pedro channel it appears off in the distance and comes directly underneath their boats Here's another case involving an entire family which occurred on June 15, 1982.

It's quite a dramatic event.

North San Diego County, just south of Orange County.

And so I seized on it and bought the boat and spent two years living on the boat, really learning the ins and outs of sailing around Southern California, out to Catalina Island.

up and down the coast, up to Long Beach and down to San Diego proper, and had gotten to the point where I could bring the boat in and out of the slip.

And it wasn't really a slip.