Capitola and Santa Cruz Boat Rentals

We made all kinds of noise about it last year — and then nothing happened. Well, this year (in fact as of today), our Santa Cruz location has a new computer and an internet connection. So very shortly - you will start seeing regular posts from the other side of town in addition to the Capitola ones. Rejoice!

Just a heads up: I’m putting together a thing I’m calling “Report Troller” that checks for and reports on updates to other fishing reports.  Nothing fancy - it’ll just say “so and such report has an update” and include a link to the site.  I’m enabling it now for just Bayside Marine, but it should work for some other pages as well.  If you have a favorite report that you’d like to have the troller checking on, please leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

[edit]

I’ve added Captain Jimmy Charters and Monterey Bay Charters reports to this as well.

Direct from VHF channel 11 about 8 minutes ago: Boccie is at this very moment headed into the harbor with 70 (SEVENTY) scoops of live sardines in the 5-6 inch range.  He and Kevin netted them just off New Brighton beach this evening.

This means:

* You can go see Boccie on S dock in the harbor and get yerself some perfect bait

* Things that eat bait are gonna be really happy about this

Someone called today to report that the weather condition system was busted (thank you!).  It looks like something got jammed up in the weather station itself - it had to be powered down completely.  It’s working again, but I suspect this will occur every few months.

We’re having a bit of trouble with server load at the moment and are working on a solution - if the site is not responding, please try back later.

The clock in the camera reset at some point in the winter - I’ve just set it properly so EXIF data in the photos will include the date & time the photo was taken again.  To see the EXIF data, just click on any photo.  If the date/time is absent, that’s a photo where the camera clock wasn’t set.  Again - as of now the EXIF data should be correct.

Here they are - hot off the presses: 2009 Boat Bucks!

Print yourself some boat bucks and get $10 off of an all-day boat rental Monday through Thursday.

This year we have two versions of bucks - one with a Capitola theme, one with a Santa Cruz one.  Both versions of the bucks are valid in both locations, so it doesn’t matter which ones you print out. If you like orange print the Capitola ones, if you’re more into green, go for the Santa Cruz ones.

The links on the right side are to PDF files with three bucks each, or you can print the images on the left - just click into them to get a bigger version.  Note that the PDF versions are easier and generally look better (provided you have a PDF viewer installed).

	Boat Bucks Version 3.0 - Capitola
	Boat Bucks Version 3.0 - Santa Cruz

If you happened to notice the data feed dropout during last night’s weather, then you now know exactly what it looks like when the dsl line we have running out on the wharf there gets “wet”.  I suppose this means that the longer you *don’t* see data, the worse the storm is. hehe.

On another technical note, I’ve enabled caching on the server side to further reduce load & speed things up.  It should be transparent to you, but if you notice any new problems please take a moment if you have one to mention it in a comment to this article.

I’m trying to make the weather data feed as robust as possible, so along the way I’m introducing error conditions that may come up.  I found a doozie last night, hence the downtime.  There will probably be another week of this.  I’m adding some graphs to the Right Now page - that’s turned out to be a bit tricky - so - please nevermind the dust.

Well, Mike H. installed the new weather station hardware on and around our radio tower in Capitola about two weeks ago, and yesterday we finally got the extra little bits that lets our computer in the store talk to the base station.  So - well - see that thing just to the right of this post here that says “Weather Now”?  The stuff in there is really actually the reading that our weather station gave us sometime within a minute of the time you loaded this page.  (That’s the kewl ).  We’ve started a page for the weather station stuff as well .  There’s actually some additional data that we can get from the system that we’re not using yet - we’ll get to it at some point.  Anyway - enjoy.

.

I’ve done a few things to address the website-sure-is-slow issue - hopefully this’ll be the end of that.

I also fixed the weather discussion formatting issue, though almost certainly tenuously - basically it’ll all go to pieces if they (NWS) change anything on their side. Oh well.

Coming soon - live weather conditions at Captiola - stay tuned!

Hydrobike Harvey explored some previously unexplored areas of physics with a hydrobike today and manged (in the process) to in fact invert said hydrobike.  It turns out that hydrobikes are *amazingly* stable *unless* you walk out to the outermost end of one of the pontoons while holding onto some part of the frame.  In this case, the weight shift causes what some in NASA might call “catastrophic failure”.   Enjoy the photos

Saturday September 27th is a free fishing day in California - you do not need a license to fish all day!

We’ve gotten a few comments about getting to the older fishing report posts (as in “how”).  There are several ways to do it, here are the easiest ways:

1. At the bottom of the fishing report page is a link to “View older fishing reports” - click that and you’ll go back in time.  At the bottom of each page after that you’ll see a link called “Previous entries” - each time you click on that you again go back in time.
2. For any date on which there was a post, the event calendar on the left side of the page will have a link.  So if you know the date of the report you’re looking for, you can select the the month and then click on the date.
3. I’ve added an “Archives” pane to the left side under the calendar - that lets you select a month/year combination.  Once you’ve pulled up a month, you’ll probably want to use the “previous entries” link on the bottom of the page as well.
4. You can use the search box in the upper right corner to look for your post.