The state Department of Forestry plans to conduct a prescribed burn at the Peninsula Open Space Trust’s Cloverdale Coastal Ranch, near Pescadero. The burn will provide training for California Department of Forestry firefighters, and to improve the habitat for the San Francisco garter snake, reports the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

People came from all over the Bay Area for the world-famous Pumpkin Festival. But the highlight for all Coastsiders is the Halloween costume contest and parade

Welcome to our second annual album of Pumpkin Festival photos. Click on the picture to see the album.

The National Weather Service has announced that due to high winds (especially on the hills) from an incoming cold front, that there will be a fire weather watch from Saturday at 6pm to Monday at 6am throughout the Bay Area. Although some rain is forecast, it is expected to be extremely light.

Click "read more" to see the full report.

Wednesday night, vandals broke the landmark teepee and smashed pumpkins at Farmer John’s Pumpkin Farm, according to the County Times.  John Muller says that he’ll have it repaired by Monday, but that it will not be ready for the Pumpkin Festival this weekend.

We went to Farmer John’s Pumpkin Farm earlier this week to shoot the pumpkin logo on our site.  He was very accomodating and let us do pretty much what we wanted during the shoot, but insisted that we "Respect the teepee".  He’d had Native America artists come out and decorate it to assure its authenticity.

Farmer John is offering a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the vandals.

The National Weather Service has issued a high surf advisory from 11am Saturday to 5pm Sunday. This will produce rip currents and erosion as well as high waves.

A strong low pressure system presently centered approximately 500 nm west of the Washington/Oregon border has generated a large northwesterly swell that will impact the California coast beginning today. Swells are expected to peak Saturday into Sunday with heights reaching 15 to 19 ft. Swells will be steep due to the relatively short periods between swells. The northwesterly swell will continue through sunday and slowly taper off Monday and Tuesday.

During the last high surf advisory, which affected south-facing beaches, five people were swept off the Pillar Point Harbor breakwater.

Faced with a decision that everyone seemed to think was a no-brainer, the Cabrillo Unified School District made no decision on whether to put its new middle school at Cunha.

Thursday night, the board faced a vote on a resolution to "direct the Superintendent to proceed with planning for new construction and reconstruction of existing buildings to create a new middle school campus on the Cunha site."

This resolution was a result of a presentation by the superintendent’s committee of experts that demonstrated that Cunha could be built twice as fast at half the cost as any other solution. This wasn’t good enough for three members of the board.  Shock and dismay were leavened with sleepy resignation as the meeting dragged on past its legal end time of 10pm.

The one member of the audience who had reason to be pleased was CCWD board member and Wavecrest stalwart Jim Larimer, who at the beginning of the meeting had urged the board to delay making a decision. This suggestion was greeted with laughter by the audience, who were no longer laughing by the end of the evening.

John Moseley and Dwight Wilson had clearly made up their mind that Cunha was the right decision and Thursday was the right time to make it. Wilson declared, "Time is our worst enemy" and said it was time to deliver a school to the community.

But three members of the board found the experts’ testimony lacking.

Jolanda Schreurs read a rambling statement that focused on the fact that the even the Cunha site would cost $5 million more than the district has in its building fund. She then pulled out a plan that no one had heard of before, which proposed turning Farallone View in Montara into a K-8 school to lower the enrollment at Cunha. This might have been an interesting plan to submit to the committee of experts.

Roy Salume struck a theme he would hammer repeatedly that evening: The District needed to buy the four parcels next to Cunha, and until they had made a decision about this, he couldn’t vote for the resolution. Salume was concerned that if a commitment to buy the lots weren’t part of the initial decision that they would not get bought.

Charles Gardner started by saying that "Cunha is a no-brainer". But he then continued that there’s a word in the construction business for a project with insufficient funding: "Not a project". Gardner would stick to this theme for the discussion that followed: He couldn’t commit money to a project if they didn’t have enough money to actually do it.

While each had his own reasons for not wanting to make a decision, collectively they were unmoved.

The greatest insight of the meeting came from Half Moon Bay High School student body representative on the board Sarah Sampson, who asked whether the resolution actually committed the district to building the school Cunha. It didn’t. But no one addressed this crucial question.

Half Moon Bay Mayor Jim Grady had spoken at the beginning of the meeting about the City Council’s desire to expedite construction, citing the rebuilding of Cunha’s Market as an example of what can be done. As the impasse emerged, he seat-hopped from the back to the front of the room, trying to get the board’s attention. Eventually, he was able to get the floor again and pleaded with the board to pass the resolution so that he could take it to the City Council meeting on Tuesday and the city could expedite the construction.

This was followed by numerous pleas from the increasingly incredulous members of the public who implored the board not to waste this opportunity to mend fences with the community. Marina Stariha, former CUSD board member who supported Wavecrest as recently as last week in a letter and article in the Review, urged the board to vote for the resolution, saying, "We need to get the community to pull together for the children".  Sarah Sampson, once again the voice of reason on the board, told the board that they risked the good will that could be gained by a vote to move forward with Cunha.

Before the board tabled the resolution, John Moseley tried gamely to get them to at least vote on it, but it was not to be. The board will take up the resolution at its next regular meeting, on Thursday, Nov 3.

Gardner gets the last word. Toward the end of the meeting, he patiently explained to Sarah, and the public, "Sometimes you have to make a hard decision."  But Thursday night was apparently not that time.

The Half Moon Bay Fire Department was called to Gray Whale Cove at about 1pm today to rescue a climber on the cliffs at the south end of the beach. According to Lt. Steve Shiveley at the Moss Beach Sheriff’s Substation, a man who was climbing up the cliffs and got stuck about 100 feet above the beach.  Firefighters from the Half Moon Bay Fire Department were lowered down to him and he was taken down to the beach.

Even by the ultraconservative Republican standards of Bay Area radio talk show KSFO [KSFO’s flag-themed website], the Brian Sussman Show stands out as the loudest daily rant. To Sussman, the Bay Area is the "belly of the beast," the heart of liberalism he despises. In a seemingly endless loop of mean-spirited invective, Sussman lambasts social programs of any type, environmentalism, public education and the Democratic Party.

So it was instructive Tuesday at drive time to listen to Half Moon Bay City Council candidate George Muteff attacking Mayor Jim Grady, Councilman Mike Ferreira, and by extension, Steve Skinner, who are running for Council as a team.

As Sussman screamed in astonishment, Muteff described how City Council had actually bought property to build a public park! And how Council was conspiring to take away property rights, despite all evidence to the contrary. "Hippies!" Sussman called Muteff’s opposition, never mind that Grady is a corporate executive, Ferreira a businessman and Skinner a realtor. Muteff ended his attack by calling on support for himself as well as Naomi Patridge and Bonnie McClung.

Then Sussman was on to his next hatchet job.

The County Times has a good description of the Highway 92/Main Street project, which has just been fully funded.  The city expects to break ground in April for the following changes. This list is updated and more accurate than the one in the County Times story:

• Highway 92 will be expanded to six lanes in both directions to Highway 1, with a center lane, right-turn, and left-turn lane in both the east- and west-bound directions at the Main Street intersection.
• A lane will be added to South Main Street at Highway 92.
• A second left-turn lane will be added to southbound Highway 1 onto Highway 92.
• North Main Street will be improved, and a bicycle lane will be added.
• A bicycle and pedestrian path will be added alongside Highway 92 from Highway 1 to Spanishtown.
• Utilities will be undergrounded.

The biggest pumpkin at the year’s pumpkin weigh-off was brought in by the guy that won last year.  Joel Holland of Puyallup, Washington won with a 1,229-pound pumpkin, exactly matching his record-setting weight last year, according to the Daily Journal. Holland has now won five times since 1992.

Eda Muller was this year’s Coastside champ with a 665-pounder. She won last year’s local honors as well.

The winner is on display in front of the I.D.E.S. on Main Street in Half Moon Bay.

Cheri Parr

David and Jonathan of Montara pose alongside this year’s winner.