Captains Hill

Captains Hill covers 21.35 acres reached from Del Obispo Street, and the city's address layer records 121 addresses on ten named streets that all keep to one theme: Admiralty Court, Anchor Circle, Compass Way, Fathom Court, Galleon Way, Lookout Court, Nautilus Way, Spinnaker Drive, Spyglass Court and Windjammer Drive. All 1.0 mile of street inside the boundary appears on the city's Private Roads layer, so the association maintains it, and the recorded map put every foot of it inside a single lettered lot. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Residential Development District, 21.3 acres of it, and the General Plan carries the same ground as Medium Density.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses. Kinoshita Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 302 students at a 22 to 1 ratio and feeds Marco Forster Middle, which enrolls 930, and San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer places all 21.3 acres in the High class, which carries its own construction and vegetation clearance requirements.

Every street in Captains Hill is nautical: Admiralty, Anchor, Compass, Fathom, Galleon, Lookout. The homes were built in 1975, four years after Dana Point Harbor was dedicated on 31 July 1971, and the naming is not an accident. This hillside is two miles from a harbor that had just been invented, and builders in the mid 1970s sold the view and the boat slip together.

Before the breakwaters, the anchorage below was working water. Richard Henry Dana Jr. called it a poor anchorage when he described it in 1835, but in the 1830s and 1840s it was the port where hides from Mission San Juan Capistrano were thrown down the cliff to waiting ships, which is how a small mission town traded with the world. The harbor that replaced it cost something: construction in 1966 destroyed Killer Dana, the surf break that came out of deep water right onto the rocks.