Half Moon Bay

We came down from San Francisco expecting a beach town and found a farm town that happens to face the Pacific. The first thing we passed was a field of pumpkins so orange against the grey sky that Lia made me pull over. It was October, and the whole coast smelled of turned earth and salt at once. Half Moon Bay is only forty minutes from the city over the hills, but it feels like a different, slower state entirely, one that never quite got the memo about hurrying.

The bluff trail

The Coastside Trail runs for miles along the top of the bluffs, and we walked it in the morning with the fog still lying on the water like a lid. Below us the beaches came and went in crescents, and the surf was doing that heavy grey Pacific thing where every wave sounds like a door slamming. We passed cyclists, a man with three greyhounds, and a woman doing tai chi facing the sea. At Poplar Beach we scrambled down the sandy path and stood at the waterline just long enough for the cold to reach our ankles and send us back up laughing.

Mavericks

Just up the coast at Pillar Point is Mavericks, where in winter the swell rears up into walls thirty, forty, sometimes sixty feet high, and the best big-wave surfers on the planet come to throw themselves at it. We didn’t see it break at full fury, thank God, but we hiked out to the bluff above the harbour where you can look at the reef that makes the monster, and even on a calm day the water out there had a dark, muscular churn to it. A local at the harbour told us, almost tenderly, how many people the wave has taken. Lia went quiet. The sea here is beautiful and it is not your friend.

Pumpkins and the harbour town

The town itself, up Main Street, is a single row of old wooden storefronts, feed stores turned into bakeries and bookshops. This is the self-declared pumpkin capital, and in autumn the farm stands pile them in pyramids and the fields open up for pick-your-own. We bought a wedge of pie and ate it on a bench, and then drove out to Pillar Point Harbour for the other half of the local economy: fishing boats, crab pots stacked on the dock, and a shack selling cracked Dungeness crab that we took down to the water and demolished with our fingers. Lia declared it the best thing she’d eaten in California, sea spray and all.

Getting There

Half Moon Bay sits on Highway 1 about 45 minutes south of San Francisco; the prettiest way in is the coast road itself, though the quick route is over Highway 92 from the peninsula. There’s no train and no bus worth counting on, so drive. Bring layers whatever the season says, because the fog runs the show here and the ocean is cold every single day of the year.