A Net Loss in Fishing Days : Environment: New regulations limit opportunities for harvesting sea urchins, which contribute to a lucrative export market.

Brett Cunningham bounces across the sandy ocean bottom near Anacapa Island like a ballerina, plucking red sea urchins from the rocky underwater landscape with a pair of tongs.

Tethered to his boat, the Johanna G. , by a thin yellow air hose, Cunningham quickly fills a four-foot-tall wire basket with the round, prickly spheres. Then he darts across the ocean floor and dumps the 50 or 60 pounds of urchins into a deep, round net, like a garbage man emptying a can into an underwater dumpster.

Cunningham, 26, had more on his mind last week than harvesting urchins, however, thanks to a series of California Department of Fish and Game regulations that went into effect this month.

The changes in rules limit urchin fishermen in Ventura County and elsewhere in Southern California to only six days in the water during July, down from 14 last year. Fishing days, which are picked by the department, also have been reduced in the prime-weather months of August and September, forcing divers to make the most of what little time they have.

Deciding to work at 90 feet--a level that many urchin divers consider too deep--Cunningham has about 25 minutes to fill the two large nets he brings down with him on his first dive. By filling both bags and netting about 600 pounds of live urchins, he will be able to make shorter dives later in the day, when residual nitrogen in his body will increase the risks of deep diving.

For Cunningham, an urchin diver for eight years, the benefits of deep diving at Anacapa far outweigh the risks, especially considering the new regulations.

It is more profitable, he says, than combing over spots near Santa Cruz Island or off the coast that have already been picked over relentlessly by the 50 to 100 Ventura County divers with urchin licenses.

It was the fear of seeing all of California’s urchin beds--which bring in more than $80 million annually from the Japanese market--tapped out that led the Department of Fish and Game to limit the number of fishing days and raise the minimum size for harvesting urchins, officials said. To Japanese palates, the yellow finger-like sex organs found inside the urchins’ prickly shells are a delicacy.

“The regulations are designed to compensate for the fact that we may still have too large a fishery in terms of divers,” said Fish and Game biologist Dave Parker.

Although the sea floor is still thick with sea urchins in many places up and down the California coast, Parker said, “there are a number of areas where sea urchins no longer are as abundant as they once were.”

The slow depletion of a fishery that has yielded about 50 million pounds of urchins over each of the past several years led department officials and experts from the sea urchin industry to hammer out the recent regulatory changes.

Their aim: ensuring the long-term viability of the fishery. More than 90% of the catch is exported to Japan, where restaurateurs pay anywhere from $35 to more than $200 per pound for the creamy, sweet delicacy, which is used to make uni sushi.

“Our industry benefits from having a consistent yield,” said Bruce Steele of the Santa Barbara-based California Urchin Divers Assn. “To achieve this, we decided that the industry must impose some regulations on itself.”

Practically everyone involved in the industry--which over the past five years has ranked as first or second among California’s fisheries in gross dollar amounts and price per pound--agrees that new regulations were necessary.

But many divers also have expressed concern that the laws will cut their income and increase the safety risk in an already dangerous industry.

“The bottom line is that the open and closed days make me work in weather I’d really rather not work in,” Cunningham said last week as he piloted his boat through six-foot seas.

“I don’t think they had safety in mind when they made this rule.”

Bob Wallen, 55, of Ojai also has noted a safety concern. “I’ve already gone out on days during the regulated season that I would not have gone on before, so yes, it is causing a problem,” Wallen said.

“But I think the rule changes were necessary,” said Wallen, who has been urchin diving for five years. “The stocks are being depleted too fast.”

This is the point that Steele, an urchin diver for 19 years and a member of the state’s Sea Urchin Advisory Committee that drafted the new regulations, made repeatedly in an interview about the rule changes.

“Which is worse?” he said. “To make money today and rob future generations of a product, or to take care of the resource--maybe picking a bit less now and ensuring the viability of the fishery over the long haul?”

Sea-urchin diving is a relatively young industry in California, with a history of barely 20 years in most parts of the state.

In the early 1970s, when the fishery was open to practically anyone with a boat, an air compressor and a diving suit, it was not unheard of for a single diver to bring in 15,000 pounds or more in a single day.

Back then, the price for whole urchins--set by Japanese buyers who run the processing plants and send the urchin roe to Japan by air freight--was often less than 10 cents a pound, Steele said.

Divers and other industry experts put the price for whole urchins today anywhere from 50 cents a pound to more than $2, depending on size and quality, with a good day’s take being anything over 1,000 pounds.

The roe--the industry’s euphemistic term for urchin gonads--comprise less than 10% of the total weight, biologists say.

Still, Steele said, “the average urchin diver is making considerably more than he did in 1985, when we began the legislative process imposing size limits and limiting seasons.”

Exactly how much the average diver makes is anybody’s guess. One industry expert estimated the figure for a diver working his own boat at between $50,000 and $70,000 before expenses.

The top expense, most divers say, is boat maintenance, including everything from annual hull repairs to complete engine overhauls.

The farther divers travel from their coastal ports, the more urchins they are likely to find, leading many to make strenuous commutes each fishing day to outer islands such as San Nicolas and San Miguel, which lie more than 60 miles from the Ventura County coast. The new regulations, some say, will discourage fishermen from such long trips on days with inclement weather and will result in more pressure on beds closer to the coast.

Other expenses include licensing--about $1,000 per year--fuel, supplies, and fees paid to line tenders, the crew members who monitor the air compressors that most divers are hooked up to while under water.

The middlemen in the urchin industry are the large processing companies that clean, preserve and ship the packaged roe to Japan.

In Ventura County, two companies contract with local divers for their catch and another 10 Los Angeles-based firms buy from divers based in Ventura or Santa Barbara counties. A few processors near Bodega Bay and Fort Bragg buy from divers in Northern California.

Jim Kawaguchi, plant manager of Tradewind Seafood Inc., oversees operations at the firm’s Oxnard plant. The company employs 35 to 60 employees depending on the season, Kawaguchi said.

Employees use a half-moon-shaped blade to crack open urchin shells. Others scoop the roe from inside the shells and clean it, while still others dip the finger-like yellow roe in a preservative solution and pack it.

Urchin roe is generally shipped to Japan and sold in commercial auctions within 48 hours of the time that it was plucked from the Pacific, Kawaguchi said.

The new regulations have affected business at local processing plants, Kawaguchi said, forcing temporary layoffs and leading to concerns over the industry’s future here.

The closed days affect “the supply going to Japan, because where you had a steady supply once, we now have dwindling output,” Kawaguchi said.

Kawaguchi said he worries a bit that additional closures “could really impact us to the point where they might look for another market.”

Most urchin divers, however, said they see the new regulations as something that will keep their fishery viable, not kill it.

Said Leonard Marcus, a Santa Barbara-based diver since 1978: “These regulations are what we need to protect the fishery--we need more of them. With a little better management, this will be a fishery that can stick around, unlike so many other California fisheries.”