See update at the end of this post.
ORIGINAL POST, JUNE 1, 6:34 A.M.: Heal the Bay's Beach Report Card unveiled last week showed 94 percent of Orange County beaches received A and B grades for water
quality during dry weather last summer, while a still-respectable 87 percent got A's and
B's in the winter.
On the minus side, Poche near San Clemente and Doheny of Dana Point landed on the Beach Bummer list of the state's 10 most-polluted beaches.
If you need to know which beach is cleanest right now, you're in luck: There's an app for that.
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And it's free!
San Luis Obispo's Coastkeeper chapter*, leaning on technology created by Lake Ontario, Canada's Waterkeeper Alliance, has developed a smart phone application that provides the latest water-quality rating for each Orange County beach. (*See Coastkeeper clarification at end of this post.)
Please keep up.
Actually, The Swim Guide covers more than 400 California beaches, so you folks freezing your coconuts off in Cayucos are in luck, too.
Besides letting you know if the water is clean, the app provides directions, view photos and such details as whether it's a good spot for groms. Users can rate their experience at the beach and even report pollution immediately, before the gubment tells you it's there.
One thing the app doesn't provide is information of how to keep a smart phone dry in wet board shorts.
UPDATE, JUNE 12, 8 A.M.: Surmising that Lake Ontario, Canada's Waterkeeper Alliance and/or San Luis Obispo's Coastkeeper chapter relied on an East Coast public relations firm that obviously does not know Morro Bay from the Magic Kingdom, Orange County Coastkeeper wants you to know that it was that chapter that helped develop The Swim Guide for our local beaches.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.