San Leandro Bay

My last post was three months ago - a fair (and sad) indication of the amount of time I've spent on the shore recently. Ironically, that previous post was from Oakland Beach, in Warwick, Rhode Island.

Ironic, because this post is also from Oakland, the one in California. This Oakland is not known for its beaches. Perhaps it was once known for its marshes, but those are now few and far between. They were either dredged to create channels or buried under the dredged material in order to create dry land for runways, highways, warehouses, and naval bases.

Arrowhead Marsh (San Francisco and Mount Tamalpais in the distance)

It was a short walk from the hotel to the MLK Regional Shoreline Park and Arrowhead Marsh, which are located on the southeastern end of San Leandro Bay, somewhere in between Oracle Arena and the Oakland Airport Rental Car facility.

AERIAL VIEW

This is not a beach, just a desperate effort to get back on the blog (although there will be a whole bunch of real beaches added in the next few days). There was a cold wind blowing straight down the dead end channel and I couldn't help think that a few wheelbarrows of gravel might make a pretty nice beach in these little coves. Unfortunately, in filled areas like this, the only gravel-size material is broken chunks of concrete. I wonder if there were originally some gravel beaches in parts of the East Bay, but back nearer the hills at the mouths of the small streams?

The workshop was on Living Shorelines, a term that's come to mean everything from engineered marshes to eelgrass restoration (and gravel beaches, too, according to those folks from up on Puget Sound), but that basically captures the idea of trying to use nature-based approaches to maintain eroding shorelines.