Anonymous
March 13, 2023, 11:20 am
6.3k Views
9 Comments
By an edhat reader
I was taking my dogs for a walk on Hendry’s Beach Sunday when I noticed a group of people participating in a beach cleanup.
They were standing around something, scratching their heads. When I got closer I saw that it appears to be some type of engine, likely from a vehicle. I wonder if they ever figured out how to get it off the beach.
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Did it wash up or was it uncovered with all the sand being removed in these storms?
There has been an engine similar to this which appears periodically near 1000 Steps, its a giant hunk of mostly iron, which will harmlessly oxidize over time in the saltwater. Boat engines look VERY similar to car engines.
Not worth anyone’s time or effort to remove, there is much more trash around which needs to be cleanup up; it has almost no recycle value.
For reference (though there may be some fine print) California Coastal Commission allows iron anchors in the ocean for commercial projects, but not concrete anchors… because the iron anchors eventually dissolve harmlessly.
Imagine this being mostly buried in sand and you’re walking on the beach barefoot. Ouch!
Maybe it’s a boat engine?
Wait maybe that’s a boats engine? Why would it be a car?
When I came to town in the mid-70s there was an entire car just east of Hendry’s Beach. I was told that kids pushed it off the cliff. It sat there for years, slowly eroding away.
Also, I think that people have used old engines as mooring points on the bottom in the past. Cheap and easy way to get something heavy on the bottom/
Judging from the bolt pattern on the back, it’s a Chevy engine.
Lots of those are used in boats.
There are a number of places up and down the coast where cars have been dumped on a beach. There was a small scrapyard’s worth of old cars (all pre WWII, mostly dodges and maxwells) buried in the sand at UCSB on the beach facing Goleta pier. Storms would occasionally uncover them. Then the next storm might bury them again for a few years. By the late seventies there wasn’t much left of any of them other than castings and chassis pieces. Legend was that this spot had been used as an actual junkyard at some point after the war.