OK, I Googled it. There was a smell. Pure methane has no smell, and the natural gas smell in gas to a house is added. But there are other gases that can come out with methane like hydrogen sulfide, (rotten eggs smell?). There are abandoned small oil fields just offshore ot st thr coast: Venice Beach and Playa del Rey, so some poorly plugged well could be leaking. I've been working with well information from wells farther offshore dried in the 1950 and 1960s in the last week.

I would be very interested in whether there is any direct evidence for increased natural seepage from offshore. This may be nothing. You can get very strong smells at UCSB campus (and especially Coal Oil Pt, and the family housing about 1 km inland from there) if there is just a light south wind or very little wind: these are from some of the largest natural oil and gas seeps in the world.

Chris