The shell game

It’s a dreary morning on the Northern California coast. A man in wetsuit and snorkel dives, scans the murky water through steamy mask, and is about to kick frantically for the surface when -- finally -- he spots his well-camouflaged prey. Finding it again in the cold and surging current may be impossible. So, with blasts of adrenaline telling the brain not to worry about evaporating air supply, the grimacing diver begins wrestling with California’s most coveted and unlikely game animal.

On another morning, atop a rocky bluff about 50 miles up Highway 1 near Ft. Bragg, a warden with the California Department of Fish and Game scans the ocean with high-powered binoculars. Spotting a cluster of divers around a rusty orange Zodiac, he zooms in. What he sees there bobbing on the swells prompts him to key his handy-talky and alert his colleague, Dennis McKiver, who is piloting a patrol boat through the fog nearby.

And so begin two recent scenes in the parallel hunts that take place during California’s abalone season, which runs from April through June and August through November. The primary hunt, in which divers pry gastropods off rocks, used to consume Southern California just a few decades back. But there are almost no abalone left here now -- which is why the state takes its hunt for poachers so seriously, and why five years ago, it ordered up a strategy for a Southern California abalone comeback -- a plan that the California Fish and Game Commission is scheduled to hold public hearings on any day now.

Oddly appetizing

George LAWRY, a 72-year-old Santa Rosa resident and founder of a judicial watchdog group called the Sonoma County Abalone Network, says he remembers wading into the water as a 12-year-old and finding it easy to pry loose the limit of 10 abalone. He remembers barbecuing abalone on the beach at family picnics and beach town restaurants that served abalone steaks and sandwiches.

Just a few decades back, abalone was California’s culinary icon, as closely linked with this state as the lobster is with Maine. It’s even harder to imagine what possessed the first Native American to try eating these slime-oozing snails than to understand why someone first chomped down on those cockroach-like crustaceans. Yet the reason the iridescent shellfish is now so rare is simple: epicurean lust.

To most modern hunter-gatherers it’s a mere bonus that the inside of an abalone shell is glass-hard “mother of pearl” -- an oil-on-water psychedelic swirl worthy of fine jewelry and the sort of folk art yard decorations that give some redwood-darkened Northern California glens the feel of creepy Hobbitvilles. What really enflames predatory passion, is the meat. Slice it just right. Grill it in butter. Then sink teeth into a delicacy of sensuous texture and exquisitely subtle taste.

Not that anything about the shellfish’s biology would explain its culinary appeal. Abalone are marine mollusks, flying saucer-shaped snails that cling to rocks with a muscular foot capable of clamping down with suction 4,000 times that of its body weight. Six species were once common in California -- black, green, pink, pinto, red and white. A seventh species, the flat abalone, is small, rare and relatively unknown.

Broadcast spawners, abalone release clouds containing millions of sperm and eggs into the water. For the method to succeed, the animals need to be within a few feet of each other. Fifty years ago, black abalone stacked up like pancakes in shallow water, and commercial fishermen harvested more than 2,000 tons of reds and pinks a year.

“When I started diving in 1968, you could go to coastal areas of Southern California and see tons of abalone,” says Pete Haaker, a biologist in the Fish and Game office in Los Alamitos. “It wasn’t like it used to be in the first half of the century. But you could see red abalone and pink abalone and green abalone and lots of fishes. Today it’s orders of magnitude lower. The problem is you just have too many people fishing a limited resource.”

Divers were never allowed to use scuba gear in Northern California. But in Southern California, where such gear was permitted, divers picked out the bigger abalone, reducing the density and the chances of successful reproduction. The abalone that were left continued to grow without making babies, until they, too, were big enough to get picked. Over 30 years of fishing, the density has dropped dramatically, leaving the few abalone that remain to live out solitary lives, childless and alone.

Population surveys show declines nearly everywhere. On the central coast, where sea otters dine on abalone, there will probably never again be a fishery. And the white abalone could be the first seafood fished to extinction by humans searching for food. The numbers are so low that one trauma could push blacks, greens and pinks into the same boat.

Legislators, seeing reports of the population crash, in 1997 ordered up the plan to save Southern California’s remaining abalone, and imposed strict hunting limits intended to save seven declining species that once blanketed the coast from Baja to Del Norte, the state’s most northwesterly county. The limit, now, is three. There is no shore picking because there are too few abalone in the shallow water. And the diver, without the aid of scuba gear, must swim to the abalone. More important, the law makers banned recreational fishing south of San Francisco and shut down the commercial fishery statewide.

There are signs that the fate of the abalone has improved as a result. Surveys show slight increases in the populations of green and pink abalone in Southern California. Just off San Miguel, the westernmost of the Channel Islands, red abalone are thriving, and biologists say it may be possible to replenish the Southern California stocks with abalone from San Miguel, while commercial fishermen hope to reopen the area to fishing. Still, the pressure on the fishery continues, in part because of a thriving black market.

Wild about wild meat

In recent years, aquatic farmers have learned to grow abalone, and they can sell it legally. But many connoisseurs consider the product, usually too small for steaks, inferior to the wild kind. A restaurateur who dares to offer wild meat risks going to prison. But illegal sales continue, and with a single mollusk costing up to $200 in foreign markets and $50 in California, a poacher with scuba gear can make thousands of dollars on one dive.

That incentive has spawned its share of detective tales. In December 2000, for instance, six wardens from Fish and Game’s special operations unit were on the tail of a suspected poacher, following him through Santa Cruz as he prepared, in the words of an anonymous informant, “to take a lot of abalone.”

According to arrest reports, they tracked the man, John Funkey, as he rented a van, lined the back seat with duffel bags and backpacks and drove to a house near the beach. As it happened, the place belonged to someone the wardens knew well.

As the threats to California’s abalone population were becoming conspicuous, the state had created a volunteer commission of commercial abalone divers to make recommendations on what might be done. Joel Roberts, of Santa Cruz, joined it. In the early 1990s, Roberts had been known throughout the commercial fishing community as a daring diver, who in 14 years had made an estimated $100,000 annually working 60 to 70 days a season. Even as the commercial catch shrank off the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts, he continued to bring back huge hauls by playing chicken with great white sharks off the Farallon Islands. When the state closed the fishery, Roberts abruptly lost 95% of his income. Three years later, he was broke.

Kathy Ponting, a lieutenant in the Fish and Game department’s special operations unit, says that when her team saw Roberts walk out of the house it was staking out, “we knew it was big.” They watched him carry his dive equipment down to Funkey’s van and begin to drive north. Over the next two nights, Roberts spent hours underwater, picking hundreds of abalone from remote spots along the Sonoma County coast.

Wardens tracked him most of the way, and continued following when, with catch in hand, the poachers headed for a dealer in San Francisco. When they reached the city, however, the two seemed to realize they were being followed.

The wardens had hoped to follow the men to the buyer. But they chose to pounce, arresting Funkey and Roberts. Inside the van, wardens found 129 abalone, some still alive and clinging to each other.

Roberts has a few months left on a three-year prison sentence. Funkey, who didn’t enter the water, was sentenced to only three months after agreeing to testify against the dealer in a separate case.

Hide and seek

The fog hangs thick along lurching Highway 1, and cars fill every pullout that offers beach access and a promising stretch of rocky coastline. For now, this is where the abalone hunting tradition survives -- in the tiny towns cut out of the rugged Northern California coastline.

Red abalone still cling to submerged rocks here. Gas stations still sell abalone-measuring tools. “Ab divers” still fill campgrounds with fish stories -- and, yes, the smell of the legendary barbecued snail.

The surf is calm, almost flat for Northern California on this Sunday morning. Foot-tall waves sneeze onto the pebbly black beach.

Divers in wetsuits 6 and 7 millimeters thick carry drum-shaped floats, fins and the official pry bars called “ab irons,” from the highway down the sandy cliffs to the beach, where they pull on hoods and weight belts and plunge into 50-degree water that stings exposed skin like a flame.

Beyond the surf zone, a diver snorkels, staring into a haze of green water featureless except for strands of kelp that pop out from nowhere like fireworks. The average visibility is about 10 feet, and the rocky bottom hides a few feet deeper.

With an educated guess, the diver grabs a huge breath of air, kicks fins into the air and descends. The weight belt slides up and settles with a jolt around the waist, dragging the diver down as the snorkel gulps up seawater. For a moment, he is lost in the void and then, suddenly, the bottom rushes up, bringing into view starfish and kelp anchors and green grass, like waving clumps of spaghetti. Abalone cling to the rock, usually in a crevice or under a ledge. The diver has a few seconds to explore such places.

Spotting a glint of white, the tiny spiral of iridescence on the outer shell, he swims in, hoping he has enough air to jam the iron under the foot and pry it lose. Kicking to stay in balance, he throws his body’s full weight into the iron. The flurry of motion uses up precious oxygen.

At last, the ab pops. And drifts downward. The diver, lungs aching, watches his prize tumbling away then lunges like a wide receiver, grabbing the abalone with both hands.

Each dive lasts maybe 20 seconds. And the difficulty of the struggle makes the focus of the hunt so intense that divers can become oblivious to the above-water world. Up the coast in Fort Bragg, warden Dennis McKiver runs his patrol boat onto the orange inflatable before many in a group of Mendocino divers know he’s there. Then he stands with a leg on the pontoon, watching with equal parts irritation and amusement as they talk themselves into a ticket.

“We just want to follow the law,” one diver says, as his companions hover over a mass of oozing abalone on the floor, arguing. Each is trying to claim only the legal limit , but they get mixed up. “No ... I saw you catch two,” one stammers.

In 15 minutes, the abalone are sorted out and everyone claims a legal take. But three of the divers don’t have licenses, a minimum $250 fine. And another is in trouble for a different offense. The warden with the binoculars saw him toss an undersized abalone back -- a violation because abalone cannot right themselves and usually die if not replaced on a rock. The diver offers an excuse. McKiver ducks into the cabin of the patrol boat and, voice discreetly soft, radios the warden on shore.

The response booms back over the patrol boat’s speakers, loud enough that every diver within 50 yards can hear: “Tell him to tell it to the judge.” Righteously popped, all fight gone, the divers look as if they feel a sudden kinship with the creatures oozing across their boat’s slimy floor.

Freelance writer Eric Simons, a 2002 graduate of UC Santa Barbara, dives, kayaks and surfs near his home in San Jose.