St. Matthew:

Gospel truth, please, to settle once and for all, is there an underwater tunnel from the ocean side of Pt. Loma into the bay? Apocryphal tales say yeah, cuz kids dumped dye on the ocean side, ran over past the lighthouse, watched it come out. For submarines?

-- Mike "Hodad" Gleeson, Oregon City, Oregon

Point Loma is full of real holes and rumors about holes. Don't think any are big enough to shoot a submarine through. And apocryphal tales are just that, apocryphal, unless maybe you talked to the kids who did the dye test. The best Point Loma tunnel rumor is that somewhere on the base is a huge cache of arms, including 10,000 Springfield rifles and 35,000 rounds of black powder ammunition, dating from the 1880s. Whoever buried it plugged up the end of the tunnel, they say, and all efforts to locate it have come to nothing. Nowadays the military dismisses the whole thing as just another tall tale. The 1880s was a pretty slow time on the point, so it was a good location for people with vivid imaginations.

In the 1840s, the Mormons who came here from Utah worked a coal mine on the ocean side of the point. The tunnel is said to have been about 100 feet deep.

Two less famous real tunnels were dug on the bay side, just south of the main gate. It was the project of some soldiers from Mexico's gendarmería fiscal and federal army interned at Ft. Rosecrans during the Mexican Revolution. They burrowed out of their barbed-wire suite and made a beeline for the border. We missed them so much, we went out and brought them back.