Maryly planned an abalone dinner .for this evening and was determined to try and get some fresh ones in the morning. I still had a couple abalone from the Mendocino Campout in my freezer, but she didn't want to use those if fresh ones were available. So we were committed to trying despite how the weather turned out. Sure enough, the swell was eight feet with strong winds on the morning we were to set out. I considered the options and decided our chances of getting an abalone was greatest at the Fort Ross Reef. My brother Paul had found abalone while swimming close to shore here and I thought we might try that.
We decided to take one kayak and use it as a float, rallying point, abalone container and emergency vehicle. We tried walking my Scupper Pro kayak out through the waves with one person on each side of the boat holding on for balance in the slippery rocks. But this was slow and cumbersome, so I jumped in the boat and told Maryly to let me tow her out to sea. This didn't work very well either, as Maryly had trouble catching her breath, and I had trouble keeping the boat pointed across the wind. So at the first clump of bull kelp close to shore I stopped to tie up while Maryly caught her breath.
We dove into the murk, trying to hunt. Visibility was one meter, water was 4 meters deep. On every dive the water got darker near the bottom due to short dark kelp growing down there. This short thick kelp made it hard to look around for abalone. I saw a few undersized ones and the only legal looking one I saw is crammed under a rock. Maryly never found the bottom but did get tangled in the bull kelp at the surface. We decided to quit. I asked Maryly wether she wanted to paddle the kayak or swim back in, and she chose to swim.
We sat and rested for a while, then Maryly got back into street clothes. Then I tried something I have never done before: Swimming out from shore without a kayak to look for abalone. This is, of course, how most people do it all the time. I swam between the rocks and under a few waves then out 100 meters or so to some thick patches of kelp a little north of where we tied up the kayak.. The water was 5 or 6 meters deep measured by how much I had to clear my ears. The water was murky at the surface from clouds of algae particles and started to clear up as I dove down. But just a meter from the bottom I would run into another layer of particles. These particles had legs! I can't focus well enough to be sure, but this looked like a layer of krill or other tiny shrimp like animals. I had heard that the krill was blooming offshore at the Faralon Islands but hadn't expected to run into them in person! Under he layer of krill the water was less turbid than where we were before and there wasn't a layer of short kelp obscuring my vision. I saw abalone on every dive. Some were small, some were hard to reach under the rocks. On my fourth dive I caught one. Following a recommendation of Marvin Fieldman I had my abalone caliper strapped to my abalone iron so I was able to measure this abalone before I headed towards the surface. It was legal sized.
I ran into another diver at the surface who had just arrived at the kelp patch. He was surprised that I was quitting with only one abalone. But this was what I told Maryly I was going to do: Swim out, look around, if I caught an abalone I would quit and head for shore. When I returned from the sea I was wearing the abalone on my chest like a large edible rainbow hued broach. Maryly joked "OK, go back out and catch three more!" But without a float, the abalone would hold me under. I had come back in holding the one abalone to my chest where it attached itself like a large piece of jewelry. I kept a hand on it in case it slipped off and got pretty tired swimming and fending off the rocks with the other hand as I rode the waves close to shore. I didn't think it was wise to wear myself out and refused to go back out again. I had managed to catch the guest of honor for our dinner that night, and decided to supplement him with two frozen abalone so that we could feed the eight people expected. The fresh abalone was mostly used to make abalone sashimi and the rest were breaded and fried in the traditional manner. Everyone found dinner to be excellent.
