NOAA is preparing to shut down two of the buoys that monitor weather in the channel: the Point Arguello Buoy and the West Santa Barbara Channel Buoy. The West SB Channel Buoy in particular is important when traveling to the western Channel Islands. It's also useful for learning what is coming down the channel; a lot of the time the wind and waves have moderated by the time they reach the East Channel. The buoys are useful and amazingly easy to access on the Web, through the National Buoy Data Center. As with GPS -- or with email or the Web itself -- the buoy pages are so easy to use that it's hard to remember that it takes a big expensive infrastructure and lots of dedicated workers to keep them running.