Exploring a Weird Island Off San Diego

right now i'm in the ocean on the cheapest raft i could find at the store and in today's video we're going to be exploring another mystery of google maps [Music] hello and welcome to sidetrack adventures my name is steve i wanted to mention that here at the beginning because recently my dad pointed out to me that i never say my name in these videos and i thought about it and he was like oh yeah he's right so welcome my name is steve this is sidetrack adventures anyway today we're in san diego california at mission bay and the reason we're in mission bay today is because recently i was looking at google maps and i saw something pretty weird and it's another google maps mystery so i've lived in san diego pretty much my entire life i was born and raised here and i've never seen this before and i showed it to some other people and they've never seen it either so i wanted to come down to mission bay today and kind of explore and take a look and see if we can find out some more information about this mystery of google maps which is west ski island so here's mission bay that's sea world off in the distance now a lot of people don't realize this but mission bay is completely man-made this was marshland up until the 1940s in the 1940s they decided that they wanted to make this a tourist attraction and began dredging it and if you look out in this direction you could kind of see what mission bay used to look like that land over there is protected marshland now all the islands out in mission bay are also man-made of course since the bay itself is man-made and that includes west ski island which is right in front of us and that's what we're here to kind of take a look at today so let's see if we can get the drone up in the air and get a better look at it in order to tell the history of west key island we pretty much need to discuss mission bay's history as a whole today mission bay is the largest man-made aquatic park in the united states but prior to the arrival of europeans the area where the bay is consisted of a number of different types of wetland habitats and at least three native american villages were located in the area when the europeans first arrived in what is now san diego they named this area false bay you can kind of get an idea from this 1857 map what the area looked like then versus now [Music] there had been some talk in the early 1900s of developing the area and around this time the name mission bay started being widely used by the 1940s the economy of san diego largely depended on the military and city leaders wanted to diversify the economy so plans to develop mission bay re-emerged in the late 1940s dredging and filling operations began converting the marsh into what mission bay park is today though the work wouldn't be complete until the 1960s 25 million cubic yards of sand and silt were dredged to create the landforms of the park which is now almost entirely man-made so of course all of the islands in the bay are man-made as well including the uniquely shaped west ski island however the creation of the islands maybe didn't have the best planning as tides and weather took their tolls on them over the years looking at google maps you could see a listing where east ski island once was but nothing remains of it [Music] by the 1980s it was mostly gone and half of whiskey island disappeared too rather than let the islands disappear completely and become hazards for boats it was decided to save them the efforts to save west ski island is why it looks the way it does now and probably why the sight of it is so unfamiliar to san diegans up until 1999 the island did not have a crescent shape it looked like any other island in the bay in the late 90s the island was reshaped stabilized with concrete blocks which you can see making up the edges of the island in this shot and east ski island was dredged and completely removed [Music] nowadays it appears the island is a popular hangout for birds including at least one seagull who decided he was going to fight my drone since this is his home and i don't want to cause him any trouble i'm going to go ahead and bring the drone back in [Music] now that we've seen it from the air i want to get out and get a closer look at it now it looks like it might be a little too far to swim i mean i could totally swim that far but just for safety's sake i think we need a boat unfortunately there aren't any boat rentals in this part of mission bay so there's no place we can rent a kayak or a jet ski or anything here so let's head to the store and see if we can find ourselves a cheap boat [Music] all right looks like this is the cheapest boat so let's go ahead and just grab this one all right this thing's a pain in the butt about halfway pumped up and i'm already tired all right so i made it about i don't know 10 20 of the way out and i don't know if this is gonna work out very well uh i'm not very far out as a matter of fact if i jumped out of the boat right now yeah i i could still walk here so let me try a little bit longer and if this doesn't work we'll find another way to get closer to that island all right so i'm about halfway out and this is way harder than i thought boy i am tired right now okay so getting out to the island on a cheap inflatable raft is a little bit more difficult than i thought and as a matter of fact right now i'm being rescued so let's see if we can figure out another way to get closer to that island so we're back on land and deflating this raft takes almost as long as inflating it i can't say that i recommend the intex explorer 300 for any ocean voyages it definitely struggled trying to get out to that island though i probably should have known something was up when there was three kids on the box and no adults [Music] all right so here we go we're on a jet ski now first time ever riding one let's see uh how good of a view we get on this island all right so we've made it to the island you can really see the blocks that make up the island now there is pretty much no sand left on the shore because of weather and tides there really isn't much else they could do to keep the island from disappearing though [Music] i'm really glad the raf plan failed as all these signs say no trespassing and that this is a protected bird habitat it would have been a lot of work to get out here on the raft only to have to turn around plus this jet ski is a lot more fun you can see the inner beach of the island here these arms probably do a really good job of protecting the beach and stopping the island from getting just completely wiped away [Music] now i'm not sure why they decided to keep west key island while removing east key island rather than either keeping both islands or removing both islands i try to look it up in the master plan for mission bay that was published back in the 1990s but there was only mention of removing east ski island there really wasn't any mention of west key island in that plan at all as we get around the side of the island the water is starting to get really shallow here and i'm going to have to move a little further out you can really see in some of the overhead shots how the island's kind of shifting to the south [Music] so even this far from the island here on the south side the water is really shallow if i jumped off the jet ski here i would be able to stand up with my head still out of the water and there are places where the water wouldn't even go up to my waist [Music] here's a buoy near the island warning of the sandbar in the shallow water because the jet ski company has my credit card on file i'm not going to get too much closer because i don't want to accidentally suck up a rock or anything into the engine and end up owning a broken jet ski and here's a quick look at where iski island would have once been [Music] so that's our look at west ski island which may or may not have been just an elaborate plan to go jet skiing thank you so much for watching if you 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Channel: Sidetrack Adventures

Views: 559,868

Keywords: Mission Bay, Mission Bay San Diego, Mission Bay History, San Diego travel, San Diego roadtrip, San Diego California, things to do in San Diego, Things to do in Mission Bay, Mission Bay islands, West Ski Island, East Ski island, San Diego history, Google Maps Mystery, San Diego wildlife, Seagull attacking drone, san diego, San Diego beaches

Id: 3OJAnlQTwUY

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022