Sea Rats Look Nice Sometimes.....

Zuma Beach - Malibu, California - August 19, 2008

If you follow my blog, you would have read about the great sushi restaurant Zuma Sushi in my post here. (Again.... yummy stuff. If you are a fan of sushi and you are in Malibu, you MUST go there.)

So, to fill in the background for the story presented there, as we discovered we were starving and we began traveling back south to find a restaurant, I was griping under my breath about not getting ANY sunset shots - which was the complete purpose of my going out that night. So my boss, who was driving, called me something along the lines of a whiner, and whipped into the Zuma Beach entrance.

We pull upto the gate - YEAH A FREAKIN GATE - and there is a guy there ready to take our money. *** Okay... an aside here. We are driving along a public beach in one of the most taxed states in the Union and they want us to pay to enter into a beach and park in a tiny parking lot? Not only that... but it was seven bucks. Aside over. *** We ask the nice attendant if we could just go in for about 10 minutes and take some pics. Promptly we are told that the regulations are that each driver must pay the fee in order to park and that he is not responsible if we decide to drive through, not pay and we get a ticket from the roaming beach cops.

So we drive through.

I'm trying to direct my boss where to park and he keeps passing inlets into the parking lot. So we all tell him where to turn on the next inlet. It was actually quite entertaining. Imagine a bunch of geeks in a car, trying to side-seat/back-seat drive while another geek is driving (fast mind you) and not really wanting to listen to anyone.

So we park... quite roughly.

And we all jump out, me with my gear, my boss and another cohort with their gear, and our fourth in his work business clothes - and we run (kind of... we ARE geeks trying to wear casual clothes) to the beach, taking up positions to catch the sun before it goes down.

I manage to get some nice sunset shots and as the sun continued to lower behind the land jut up the coast, I saw these sea rats (seagulls for you laymen) running with the tide, picking up whatever sea rats pick up. I snapped off a bundle of shots, while my injured foot is killing me (another story) and my sandals are filling up with sand. (Yeah... I should have taken them off.)

Above is the result... and SEE, searats can actually appear to be quite pretty when set in the right lighting with the right scenery.