Situation vacant: town shooer required for small southern Californian harbour community. Must be prepared to work all hours. Should not be afraid of water or 800-pound pinnipeds.

Newport harbour, just south of Los Angeles, has a problem. A large problem. A large, blubbery problem, with fetid breath, bad manners and a propensity to bark deep into the night. Oh, and it likes to sink boats too.

Two weeks ago the Razzle Dazzle, a recently restored 1910 sailing boat, sank in Newport Harbour. It had been boarded by 18 of the sea lions who have adopted the harbour as their home. Unfortunately for Razzle Dazzle's owner, Jerry Dunlap, their combined weight was too much for the antique boat.

"I was kind of dumbfounded," said Dunlap. "This is a major setback. I'm 63, I don't know if I feel like working another two years to get a boat to work."

The sea lion invasion continues southern California's recent spate of encounters with the wonderful world of nature. The silly season, at least here, shows no sign of abating.

The Monster of Machado Lake - or Reggie the caiman, to give him his official name - is still at large in Harbor Park. Alligator wrangler Jay Young - the man brought in from Colorado to catch the overgrown house-pet - told news agencies at the weekend that he had successfully wrangled Reggie and had carted him off to the LA zoo.

"He put up a good fight," said Young, his alligator-tooth necklace glinting in the evening sun. Except, he hadn't. In fact, Young wasn't even in California at the time.

"To the best of my knowledge and all the reports I have received this morning, it was a hoax," said Ron Berkowitz, of the LA parks department. "There was no capture."

Fortunately for Berkowitz, Young and, indeed, Reggie, California's attention had been diverted a few miles south to the more visible threat posed by the marauding sea lions at Newport Harbor.

The sea lions appeared in May, and began doing all those cute sea lion things tourists love to see: basking in the sun, croaking in a general way at anything and nothing, and looking for food.

Unfortunately for the boat owners and residents, their chosen basking spot went from a flat spot near an anglers club to the decks of boats. Swim stairs, rather than being a deterrent, have merely enabled the sea lions to board the boats.

Boat owners have placed chairs and other barriers on their decks to deter the beasts, but to little avail. Two days before it was pushed to the bottom of the sea, Harbor Patrol deputies chased a sea lion from the Razzle Dazzle's cabin.

"We've done what we can," said the Harbor Patrol's Erin Giudice. "Hopefully, we can educate people that these are not nice animals that look cute."

It was time for drastic action. Unfortunately, Newport Harbor authorities are limited in what they can do.

Following the near disappearance of sea lions from the Californian coast, Congress passed the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which forbade the killing or even the harassment of sea lions. The measure was so successful that there are now an estimated 400,000 of them lolling off the west coast of the US.

Fortunately, other communities have faced the be-whiskered threat before and have come up with an array of interesting if ineffective measures to deter the interlopers.

Seattle introduced "Fake Willy", a plastic whale plopped into Puget Sound to deter sea lions nine years ago. But the sea lions weren't fooled. Others have tried underwater fireworks and piped predator sounds, to little avail.

At a Harbor Commission meeting on Wednesday, one resident told how she scared the sea lions off by squirting them with a garden hose.

"These animals hate to get wet," said Monica DeAngelis of the National Marine Fisheries Service. "It's kind of funny."

The Commission voted to ask the city council to pass a law banning the feeding of sea lions. "The more you feed wild animals, the more they want to hang around," said Chris Miller, harbour resources supervisor.

And the idea of recruiting a sea lion shooer, to walk around banging a stick on the dock to disturb the beasts? It has been tried with some success in other places, but Newport's residents decided it would be too costly and, like the sea lions themselves, too noisy.