When I was in college I avoided classes, and perhaps even careers, that involved significant amounts of writing. This wasn't exactly for lack of anything to say, or for a a particular fear of writing. My biggest problem with writing assignments was the size requirements, specifically the MINIMUM number of words necessary. I wondered how could anyone possibly find enough words to fill up these assignments? I would list all the facts, my hypotheses, a conclusion. I would expand each of these into sentences and paragraphs. I would pad out what I had written with some extra verbiage and some repetition. And I would still be only 25% of the way to the minimum number of words. What else can I possibly say on this subject? In one particularly painful (but required) class I talked to a friend of mine, Jeff, about the problem. Jeff recommended making stuff up, and had some specific recommendations about the professor and what sort of bullshit would be particularly attractive to him. I envied Jeff's ability to sit down and blather on for 500 words or more on paper when he actually had nothing to say. Since then I have lamented the fact that schools do not teach students this essential writing skill. They teach spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence and paragraph construction. But they never teach you how to bullshit, even though they require that you be able to do it.
Then and since I have occasionally heard the recommendation that if you want to become a writer, start keeping a journal. What I have never heard stated explicitly before is, if you keep a journal for a while, you will develop the facility to ramble on for hundreds of words on paper without hardly trying. This was the trick nobody taught me in college, the trick that would have allowed me to fly through all those essay classes with ease. I didn't start keeping this journal to improve my writing, but it may have done that. Well, it may have improved the quality of my writing also, (you may be the judge of that), but I an now able to blather on for hundreds of words of print without hardly trying. I notice that the first few entries of this journal are very terse, and they gradually get longer and longer. Now I find myself constantly deciding what details to leave out. I mention all this because I am wondering if I should continue to report details of kayak trips like my abalone dives. If it was really just my journal, I would keep documenting them. But it is not just my journal, and I sort of like the discipline of knowing that there really is an audience, even if only my brothers and sisters actually read them all. If I didn't have that audience, I would probably write even longer and more detailed descriptions of what I saw. I'll try the following experiment: On abalone dives I will try to keep the description short (after this one) and only write about the things that are new or unusual about each diving trip.
I launched from the cove at the north end of Fort Ross Reef Campground. It was a Sunday, on a warm summer weekend and the campground was completely filled. Almost every campground had a couple wetsuits hanging out to dry. The parking lot near the cove was practically full also, but most of the divers I saw were already out of the water or getting out. I got in the water and paddled half a kilometer over to try the same place Paul and I had recently seen so many abalone. On a bright sunny day, all my fears of sharks in the water evaporated. Totally unjustified, since both of the shark kayak attacks I have read about recently happened during the day. And here I was risking life and limb to go abalone diving solo again without a care in my head.
The swells at sea were a little rougher than the last time I was here, and Ocean Conditions was reporting 15 foot visibility. But when I got in the water, the visibility was much worse than the last time I was here. I could not see the bottom until I was was within 3 meters of it, which was still thankfully better than most of my other diving experiences. There was quite a surge near the bottom, which could drag me 10 meters one way or the other if I let it. This was actually quite fun, giving me the feeling of effortlessly flying over an alien landscape. Several times I let this happen, and skimmed over the bottom using the 3 meter visibility to scan the rocks for the abalone that you only saw after staring at the bottom for a while. But usually, I would see a deep spot that looked particularly enticing to the abalone model I have running in my head. Paul says that thinking like an abalone is a good idea, but you also have to think like an abalone diver, and then do something different to find the ones everybody else missed. I found three abalone in sort order, then found one that I think was undersized. I didn't bother to measure it, just compared it to my hand and brought it back down and stuck it back in a crack.
Then I rested on the kayak for a few minutes. I took out a power bar and discovered that they sink rapidly if they slip out of your fingers into the water. Three divers came by who had been working farther out on the reef. I had seen large waves come by and break around them and was amazed that they didn't get smashed up on the rocks. Back where I was, the waves had to come all the way around the length of the reef, so they were never very big. I got back in the water and went looking for my fourth abalone to fill my limit. The surge pulled me past an area that had a bunch of small ones that looked just barely legal to me. Paul claims that they look deceptively large underwater, and he has to carefully measure them all. I don't seem to have this problem and can tell at a glance underwater which ones are going to be close, and which ones are obviously legal size. I skimmed over four of these barely legal ones, and then when I was just about out of air I turned back and picked the largest, fattest looking one. When I brought it back to the kayak and measured it, it was five millimeters over the legal limit!
Either I am getting in better shape, or I'm learning how to handle myself in the water more efficiently. When I finished getting out and stowing all my equipment, I was not totally exhausted yet! I saved that for hauling the equipment and kayak back to the car. But first I paddled back over the reef. As the waves came around the reef, they turned in and broke into both sides about the same time. Close to shore, the reef has a nearly flat area that was under just a few meters of water. I rode one wave most of the way over this, and watched the next wave coming. The two halves of the wave meeting in the middle created a traveling pyramid of water that ran down the length of the shallow reef area. I was far enough over the reef to barely get a shove from this as it zoomed behind me.
Marty and I have been feeling guilty about all the fat that you end up adding to abalone when you fry it in the traditional manner. (Slice, tenderize with a mallet, dip in egg and spiced bread crumbs, fry in butter or oil). So she started looking for and thinking about low fat abalone recipes. Eating Well magazine recently published an abalone stew recipe. Marty's house-mate John in Berkeley recently got married and got a pasta maker as a wedding present. They tried making lemon pasta with it recently, and Marty held on to some of this for trying out with abalone. So I saved the smallest of this catch from the freezer, and Marty made Abalone Pasta with it. She didn't want to overpower the abalone with strongly flavored vegetables, so we put crook-neck squash, red bell pepper, mushrooms, and just a little onion. Despite the care not to overpower, the mild taste of the abalone was still nearly lost in our vegetable pasta dinner. Would dinner have been just as yummy without the abalone? We'll have to do A-B testing one of these days, and invite some vegetarian friends over to help finish off the batch that doesn't have the animal protein in it.