Another “I lived a few miles away and never knew?” moment. The cruise around Newport Harbor in a Duffy boat.

This place is huge! Not some cozy little body of water like Alamitos Bay in Long Beach.

Among Newport Harbor’s attractions:

Seals! I thought I could hear them barking, in the night, and there they were, sleeping it off on the rear step of several large (and perhaps abandoned) power boats moored in various parts of the harbor.

Apparently, about 15 seals live year-round in the harbor, which presumably offers all sorts of feeding possibilities (and far fewer sharks) than the ocean, and at this time of year another 60 or 70 might drop in to see what’s going on.

They actually are considered a menace/nuisance, because they’re big and wild and messy and noisy. And a bit destructive, too, when they heave themselves up on the back of your old yacht and squish the plastic kayak you had tied back there. (Sorry, Leah forgot the camera).

Newport Harbor has thousands of boats in it. Many of them don’t dock; they just float in the channels, and you wonder how it is that various nautical craft don’t crash into them (like, say, an electricity-powered Duffy boat), but I guess they don’t.

We learned that none of the several islands in the harbor is natural, aside from a little place called Bay Island, which is crowded with massively expensive homes overlooking a private beach, on the other side of a private bridge.

The harbor is currently being dredged, which is certainly needs; I can vouch for the shallowness of the canals around Little Balboa Island — when the tide is out, about half the boats are semi-grounded.

A tour of the harbor in your Duffy boat, while sipping a nice vin rose, can be quite fun, especially when the man at the wheel can tell you which homes belong to which tycoons, sheikhs and celebrities. “John Wayne’s house was there. That’s not actually John Wayne’s house; it was torn down years ago and then they built that house. But that’s where it was.”

It’s all quite remarkable, the hundreds and hundreds of big, well-appointed homes with stunning bay views, and the 1,001 monster yachts. The place just has so much stuff, including dozens of bayside restaurants and a car-carrying ferry.

If you live in Southern California, and thought life on the bay was Venice Beach or Naples Island, drive down to the Duffy boat rental on the Newport Beach mainland, and tool around the nooks and crannies. Newport Bay is more like San Francisco Bay than Alamitos Bay. All it’s missing is a naval station and MccCovey Cove. Well, and Oakland.