Michael Most people think of San Francisco as a crazy big city and forget that the entire western side lies directly on the Pacific, whose mighty waves pound our local beach. We often walk along the beach; one of our favorite routes is 10 kilometers long!
Along the way, we find all kinds of sea creatures washed ashore. Seashells, of course; the iconic sand dollars; great clumps of kelp; giant crabs; we have even seen a whale skeleton (Figure 4)! And then, of course, there are smoothly polished shards of glass and stones in every color and shape. We usually take a few finds home for our extensive collection.
Every now and then, we encounter a new creature. Recently, for example, we came across thousands of tiny jellyfish with raised, translucent, gelatinous sails (Figure 3). They are about the size of a chicken egg, shimmer an exotic blue, and are called by-the-wind sailors, or "Velella velella" in scientific Latin.
The sail, which helps them zip around the ocean like tiny windsurfers, looks as though it is made of plastic and contains circular ribs that make it resemble a target. They let the prevailing northwesterly winds propel them, but when the wind turns southwest—as it usually does here in Northern California in the spring—it blows them onto the Pacific beaches in huge numbers, where walkers marvel at them as though they were the seventh wonder of the world.
The book OceanBeach by Eddy Rubin contains numerous details about sea creatures washed ashore—seemingly more than Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" contains about the different species of whales.
According to the book, the by-the-wind sailor's scientific Latin name is "Velella velella." Author and surfing legend Eddy Rubin knows San Francisco's Ocean Beach better than anyone. For decades, he has not only ridden its challenging waves but also analyzed and explained the flora and fauna of our local beach in minute detail. Well worth reading!