The North Coast Abalone Wars

Charlie Lorenz has been diving the foam-washed coves of California’s North Coast for 20 years, and he’s aghast. Abalone, the undersea snail prized as part of the culinary and cultural heritage of these parts, is being illegally looted by poachers like never before.

“We’re sick of it,” said Lorenz, a Fort Bragg diving instructor. “I’m seeing more poaching than ever.”

The plundering of abalone has gotten so bad that state game wardens have made it their top law enforcement priority for the coast.

With the zeal of drug agents stalking a cocaine cartel, the state Fish and Game Department is using everything from sophisticated night vision scopes to good old gumshoe detective work to crack down on the black market for abalone.

Such efforts paid off this month as agents from the department’s covert operations unit wrapped up a six-month investigation and swooped down on an abalone poaching outfit suspected of ringing up $1 million in illegal sales over the past year. With 16 arrests, it was California’s biggest abalone bust in at least five years.

“Worldwide, abalone is almost like cocaine trafficking,” said Fredrick Cole, deputy chief of the Fish and Game Department’s enforcement branch. “The way it’s laundered and shipped can be similar to a drug cartel.”

Demand for abalone has long exceeded supply, sending prices soaring. These days, a typical abalone--yielding only a couple pounds of meat--can fetch $80 or more on the black market.

The allure remains particularly hot in Asian communities from San Francisco to Hong Kong, where abalone is a prime ingredient for top restaurants and sushi chefs, plays an important role in traditional medicine, and is prized as an aphrodisiac.

Such needs were met for years by a commercial market that hauled in 5 million pounds annually from the Central Coast and Southern California. But the abalone population in those areas suffered a precipitous decline, fueled by the years of commercial harvests, disease and the resurgent sea otter population. By 1997, wildlife officials had put abalone off-limits to commercial and sport divers from San Francisco to the Mexican border.

The result has been increasing pressure by poachers on the North Coast, the lone abalone grounds still open to sport divers.

That’s where Dennis McKiver comes in. A warden for the past two years in Mendocino County, McKiver is part of a bolstered Fish and Game presence wading into the North Coast abalone wars.

He was out as the sun began to rise one recent day. Driving from cove to cove, McKiver hid his dark green pickup amid the bushes, then crept to the sheer bluff edge, scanning the seaweed-choked waters with powerful binoculars.

“Just recently we found three gunnysacks stuffed with abalone some poacher planned to come back for,” McKiver said. “We’ve probably got more than a dozen different groups hitting Mendocino, and even more down in Sonoma County.”

In Mendocino, Fort Bragg and other seaside communities in this region, abalone is a prized part of the coastal identity--and economy. By some estimates, abalone divers pump more than $10 million into the local economy.

Everywhere one turns, the mollusk is in evidence. Many fog-wrapped clapboard houses are decorated with rows of abalone shells framing roof lines or fence tops.

And then there’s the tradition of the abalone feed, a home-grown feast featuring the coast’s most famous mollusk as the main dish.

“It’s almost like a religious event up here,” said Brooke Halsey Jr., a Sonoma County deputy district attorney who specializes in poaching cases. “You get a good California chardonnay, some bread, the ab. It’s a great social food.”

Current rules protecting abalone are strict. All sales are prohibited. Sport divers can take four a day for personal consumption, but only those seven inches in diameter or bigger (the slow-growing creatures take more than a decade to reach that size). Oxygen tanks and other breathing aids are forbidden.

Penalties can be tough. Owners of a sushi restaurant in Sonoma County were recently fined $20,000 and put on three years’ probation for buying black market abalone. Some leaders of big-dollar poaching rings have gotten three-year prison sentences, while a few others have served county jail time.

Some environmentalists and Fish and Game officials say it’s not strict enough. They want egregious poaching declared a felony and favor a cap on the number of days a diver can go out.

With the commercial abalone fleet now out of business, large-scale operations are difficult to hide, and black market suppliers have compensated by shifting tactics. Instead of a few unscrupulous operators taking huge numbers of abalone as in the past, the North Coast has been hit by fleets of poachers who cloak their true intentions under the guise of sport diving, McKiver and other wildlife officials say.

The suspected poaching ring busted earlier this month allegedly sent vanloads of people up from the Bay Area each day. Though only a few from the crowd would actually dive for abalone, agents said, everyone would return home hefting the limit of four, a forbidden practice known as “dry sacking.”

Much of the abalone was sold on street corners or in parking lots. Investigators say that there never seemed to be a shortage of buyers and that the group profited handsomely with some participants collecting a tax-free salary of $100,000.

With such high stakes, agents say, these abalone pirates took extra precautions to avoid getting caught: One woman would hide in a sea cave and stuff extra abalone into the top of her wetsuit. Another suspect being tailed back to the Bay Area slowed to 35 mph on the freeway to ditch undercover wardens.

Agents say many of those arrested are immigrants from nations without strict environmental laws. “Now it’s a matter of us educating them about our laws,” McKiver said, “and making them realize we’re serious about enforcing them.”

On this foggy day, McKiver saw few divers, let alone poachers, and he never even got close to pulling out his ticket book. With the big bust earlier in the month, the game warden figured, many poachers were lying low.

“But they’ll be back in a week or two,” McKiver said. “They always are.”