Changelog

Nobody publishes how full a Dana Point beach lot is. Salt Creek goes on a summer morning, the free lot on Selva goes early, and the harbour keeps moving where a car can be left. The only people who know are the ones who just drove in. So there is now a board for it: five lots, three answers each — spaces, filling up, full. Anyone can read it without an account. Signing in lets you add to it, and reports fade off after three hours, because parking does. It shows the middle of recent reports rather than the latest one, so a single bad report cannot move it. And nothing posted there reaches anyone who can open a gate or fix a machine — OC Parks and the state park are on the page for that.

The state's laboratory has taken more than 158,000 ocean-water samples at Dana Point's beaches. That record has never been laid out spot by spot for anyone who lives here, so we have done it. Since 2021, Salt Creek Beach has come back over a California bacteria standard on one sampling visit out of 232. MSI Beach on none out of 231. The San Juan Creek mouth at Doheny, on 79 out of 286 — and three thousand feet south along the same sand, on 11 out of 257. Doheny is not one beach, and neither is this coast. The new page reads the record live from the State Water Resources Control Board's open data and shows every sampling point the county takes, with the counts beside every rate so you can check the arithmetic. It also shows the month-by-month pattern — February goes over on about one visit in six, July on about one in fifty — and the rain that fell in the last three days, because that is what moves the creeks. What it cannot tell you is whether the water is clean this morning. The state's archive runs months behind and always will. The county answers that question, and its page and its recorded line are on the tool.

The tidepools only show on the lowest tides. This new tool lists the upcoming minus tides from NOAA's predictions and flags which fall in daylight, alongside where the pools are, the marine-conservation-area rule — look all you like, take nothing — and how to visit safely.

The free trolley with its live tracker, the Sunday concerts at Sea Terrace Park with the rest of this year's lineup, the Saturday market at La Plaza, and the fall festival dates — the Maritime Festival (the Tall Ships Festival's new name), Ohana, and the 2027 Festival of Whales — each verified against its own page.

A colored-pencil banner of the sheltering sandstone bluff and its clifftop preserve, with small boats moored in the calm water below and the open Pacific beyond.

Dana Point is the Dolphin & Whale Watching Capital of the World. The new guide shows which whales and dolphins are out there each month — gray whales in winter, blue whales in summer, dolphins all year — with the harbor's boat operators and the best places to watch from shore.

Dana Point has no tide station of its own, so the tool carries NOAA's official predictions for San Clemente, about six miles down the same stretch of coast, and says so on the page. Between the published highs and lows it estimates the current state of the tide and labels that estimate as one.

A tide table, a guide to all five beaches, a tracker for the $600 million harbor rebuild, a who-to-call directory for the six governments that share the town, and a surf check for Doheny, Salt Creek and Strands. Every fact was read off an official page this week, and each tool says plainly what it can't tell you — starting with Doheny's water quality, which you should check at ocbeachinfo.com before swimming.