Good morning and welcome to summer. In honor of the Frankie Valli’s favorite season, we were going to look at six of my favorite beaches along the central coast. But the weather gods have been unusually active and the skies have been lit up around Monterey Bay. Here’s what’s gone down and or should I say gone up in smoke.

Around 2:30 pm on Friday I noticed some huge plumes of smoke in the sky. Since there was no Doobie Brothers concert scheduled that afternoon I immediately went on photo alert. It was an extremely hot afternoon-it seemed a little bit like earthquake weather as major smoke was billowing into the sky. It was somewhat surreal and horrific as I had just shot another major blaze the week before. I took the first photo from the wharf while at the time not knowing where the fire was blazing. All I knew is that somewhere people and animals were probably panicking. I later learned the flames forced the closing of a 5-mile stretch of Highway 1 creating even more chaos for residents in the area.

Out on the wharf I ran into a policeman I knew and he said the word on the street was that someone had deliberately set five different fires. My first thought was, what is this kind of evil doing in our golden state? We are in the midst of a horrible drought here on the central coast and haven’t had any rain since April 23. The ground and brush were dryer than a sports bar in Salt Lake City on a Saturday night. On May 22, a fire broke out in Corralitos which torched 4,270 acres and destroyed 35 homes. The cost of fighting that fire was $16 million. Then on June 11, a 520 acre blaze destroyed 3 homes and cost the state another $5 million to extinguish. And more fires were started by lightning on Saturday but that’s a subject we’ll take a look at on Wednesday.

Reports were that someone had witnessed a motorcyclist setting spot fires in four or five areas about 20 feet apart along Highway 1. Those small fires erupted into hundreds of acres within hours, racing up the hillsides, leaving panicked residents little time to collect their belongings and get out and leaving animals trapped with no way out. By this time, more than 600 firefighters had poured into the region. Meanwhile, temperatures were hitting a record 105 in Watsonville near where the fire was centered as the high heat, low humidity and lack of rain contributed to the fast moving blaze.

But luckily, thanks to numerous aircraft attacking the fire, from fixed-wing planes dropping retardant to helicopters dropping water, firefighters were able to control the blaze. But not without cost. This was a disaster for both humans and animals. Anxiety, shock, fear-these are just some of the emotions that go along with these tragedies when people lose their homes. Overall, the fire is out but it burned 630 acres and the loss of pets and homes in still smoldering in our south county.

It’s been a tad on the warm side as the thermometer hit 102 on Friday. I don’t want to say it was hot this day but I was sweating like Bear Stearns executive. It was so hot that I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walking. That’s in comparison to last week when it was so windy that I saw Siamese twins looking for one another. Anyway, the all-time record for the warmest day in Santa Cruz was set back on September 7, 1904 when the thermometer hit 108 degrees.

So with any luck that’s our final look at any smoke on the water for this summer season. Coming up on Wednesday we’ll take a look at the very unusual weather that followed on Saturday. Oh, and by the way, the cormorant eggs have hatched along West Cliff and the proud parents and now sitting on the little ones. We’ll check our those youngsters on Friday. So have a magnificent Monday and enjoy the summer mode. Aloha, Tiger Woods fans.

Good morning and welcome to the central coast, where we’ve experienced two major forest fires in the last month. The first, the Summit Fire in the Santa Cruz mountains, burned 4,270 acres and destroyed 35 homes. The second began last Wednesday. I was cruising the westside at around 3:30 when all of a sudden white smoke appeared in the sky (photo #1) coming from the Bonny Doon area. As the fire spread it looked like a bomb had gone off (photo #2.) I was shooting at Natural Bridges as the smoke spread across the sky in a rather eerie fashion. Soon everything was changing color due to the smoke and the ocean (photo #5) turned into a coppertone sea. As the smoke got thicker the sun (photo #6) displayed shades of colors that signaled something is very wrong here today.

Fortunately, as of today the Martin Fire is pretty much contained. We have some friends living in Bonny Doon who refused to evacuate their home so things were kind of dicey for a while. Overall, 520 acres burned and the cause of the fire is under investigation. Investigators are speculating that hikers, trespassers or magic squirrels in the Moon Rocks area of the Bonny Dune Ecological Reserve might have accidentally ignited the blaze. Rumor has it that this area, which is closed off to the public, is a favorite spot for people who like to practice preventive glaucoma.

So I got to wondering, what’s the story with wildfires, these raging blazes that rapidly spread out of control, much like the Bush administration did after 9/11? Like vacations, they occur most frequently in the summer, when lightning and morons are roaming the sky and woods. We haven’t had any rain in months and the brush was dry and the flames moved unchecked through the woods like Ray Allen did through the lane at the end of the game 4 on Thursday night. Like the Bonny Doon blaze, fires often begins unnoticed and spread quickly with the wind carrying the flames from tree to tree. As you can see in photo #3, dense smoke is the first indication of either a fire or a Grateful Dead concert.

These intense displays by Mother Nature got me to wondering about other big-time fires. Here’s number one on the disaster hit list. On the evening of October 8, 1871 the worst recorded forest fire in North American history raged through northeastern Wisconsin and upper Michigan with hurricane force winds. By the time it was over, 1,875 square miles of forest had burned, an area twice the size of the state of Rhode Island and Donny Rumsfeld’s ego.

An accurate death toll has never been determined since local population records were destroyed in the fire. An estimate of between 1,200 and 2,500 people were thought to have lost their lives. Peshtigo, Wisconson, the town hardest hit, had an estimated 1,700 residents before the fire. The city was gone in an hour. In Peshtigo alone, 800 lives were lost. More than 350 bodies were buried in a mass grave, primarily because so many had died that no one remained alive who could identify many of them.

The fire was so intense it jumped several miles over the waters of Green Bay as well as jumping the Peshtigo River itself to burn on both sides of the inlet town. Surviving witnesses said that the firestorm generated a fire tornado which threw rail cars and houses into the air. The smoke blocked the sun, the rising moon turned red and witnesses thought it was a sure sign of the apocalypse.

This Peshtigo fire represents the greatest tragedy of its kind in North America. Yet amazingly, most people have never heard of it because it occurred at the same exact time as America’s most famous fire-the Great Chicago Fire that destroyed 17,450 structures, caused about $200 million in damage and left one-third of the city homeless. This makes the suffering of present day Cubs fans look like a romp in the park. As you can imagine, this fire grabbed all of the national headlines. But citizens of Wisconsin are well aware of this painful tragedy as well as the Packers losing to the Giants in this year’s NFL playoffs

So that’s our look at the Hall of Flames. If you follow the national news, you know the torrential floods in Iowa and killer tornadoes throughout the midwest have been dominating the headlines. Hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes, reality television, we are living through some wild times. So get on board and enjoy the ride here at Sunrise Santa Cruz and we’ll catch you for some Larry bird action on Wednesday. And speaking of which, get ready for game 6 between the Lakers and the Celtics Tuesday night. With any luck, it will be a classic. Later, sports fans.