Outdoor adventurers can become travel snobs faster even than wine-country taste-tour aficionados because of our relentless revelry in the off-beat parts of the world. We must be careful not to cheat ourselves of some delicious experiences that may resemble Yellowstone traffic in July.

SoCal is overpopulated, yet a day spent sea kayaking and snorkeling the La Jolla Cove Ecological Reserve off San Diego is an experience I will not forget. Protected since 1929, an underwater canyon drops away from the beach here starting in shallows just few feet deep (where the sharks are spawning now amid wading tourists) down to thousands of feet. Sea creatures from squid to whales feed their way up the canyon, and the nutrient upwellings mean there’s an explosion of marine life here.

Sitting in a big dark sea cave where surfers have been trapped, swimming with sharks, lolling in huge swells at the base of cliffs - daydreams about my August trip there come back thick and seem surreal.

More flashbacks:

- Rolling out of the kayak with snorkel gear and coming face to face with dark, lethal-looking five foot sharks RIGHT off the beach in the middle of packed La Jolla beach in the middle of tourist season.

- Sucking in and out of sea caves with the current, shooting 20 yards through narrow walls as the waving ocean grass rolled by like film below through my mask, lit up here and there with blaze orange garibaldi fish.

- Watching my gonzo guide Ilya (friends call him ‘Ill’) root under dark kelpy ledges like a bear tearing into a log, so that only his swim fins could be seen 12 feet down and coming up with huge lobster, octopus, starfish, abalone.

- Bashing out through surf in a paddling frenzy and riding waves back in while sharks scattered below the boat.

- Watching Ilya, who dove as a child with Jacques Cousteau, poke at a bump in the sand, also in the surf zone, to make irritated stingrays pop up from nowhere in a flurry to scurry off.

- Holding bigger lobsters than I ever saw in the backcountry of the Florida Keys, lobsters softball-thick in the body and so powerful they snap their tail and move you sideways before popping out of your hand.

Once in a while you meet someone who is remarkable. My amphibious guide Ilya (ee-lee-ya) Kurtchi was the highlight of the trip. Slender and six-foot three, he cruises through the water like a hungry seal, finding and sharing the critters of the sea like a kid hunting Easter eggs.

I’m pretty sure he has gills. He catches the sharks by hand, and the octopus, abalone and lobsters he pointed out are things others would have a tough time finding. His father was a marine biologist with Cousteau, (yes, aboard the Calypso) and Kurtchi’s level of comfort with the ocean makes him look a little nuts.

Bright green and orange cattle truck kayaking operations headed by surfer dudes now stream gobs of tourists into the La Jolla waters for quickie tours, paddling out to the yawning mouths of the sea caves scattered along the south end of the reserve. They have a good time, and get what they pay for. Ilya just turns it all up a notch. He is no surfer dude, but a frenetic amateur marine biologist. He charges a little more, and in exchange makes sure you miss nothing. He can be tough to get out of the water if he sees his guests are into it; our planned three hour tour stretched to five.

He was among the first to start doing kayak tours of the La Jolla Cove Ecological Reserve, and kept doing his naturalist’s hands-on intimate tours while other outfits exploded around him.

Through the sea caves you go, way into the sea caves, and with Ill leading the way, you will see a lot more critters than the obvious sea bass and Garibaldi.

Hundreds of miles of coast and islands can be kayaked in this area, but the Reserve offers what many empty miles do not; super-concentrated sea life because of total protection. The only thing that harvests fish, clams, lobster, abalone or anything else in the reserve are the sea lions. So even though it is adjacent to a city, the clean green waters of the reserve have abundance you might not find in remote parts of the Baja Peninsula because it is a place where lobsters die of old age.

The black and brown spotted leopard sharks teem along shore all summer long, hanging as close in as 20 yards from shore all day long (shallow enough to wade amongst them). Relatively harmless bottom feeders, like the nurse sharks of the Caribbean, they are dark, sharky-looking sharks all the way and quite imposing, long and angular with a serpentine swimming motion.

Some scatter from the kayak and others loll below snorkelers and ‘yakers with spooky indifference. A long time ocean-rat, I still found it unnerving when four or five of their languid shapes converged together a few feet below my belly button.