His name is Curt, and he said that Russian Gulch was one of the best kept non-secrets on the Sonoma coast. He reported that he consistently finds his limit of 9 inch abalone just off the southern point of this beach. Although I often see divers climbing down the cliff from the points just south of here, Curt says they rarely walk the flat trail out to the beach here. He was willing to swim a few hundred meters around the point to get to his spot, and I followed along on this trip.
With a little float, Curt was able to stay close to the rocks and quickly started finding large abalone. I had to tie my kayak to kelp farther from the shore and swim in, and I was not as comfortable close to the rocks. I didn't even see any abalone. Between dives Curt did not live up to his name and was very talkative. I found that I had to tread water pretty hard to keep my ears high enough out to hear what he was saying. This was exhausting. Soon I had to climb out onto the kayak, stretch out, and relax with my head supported on the seat back and my eyes closed. Curt said: "I'm going to have to get one of those. You look entirely too comfortable"!
The waves looked a little rougher than predicted, and there was a strong surge around the rocks of the point. At Curt's suggestion, I went a little farther south and dove on the edge of a kelp bed away from the rocks. I finally started seeing abalone, but they were all crammed in cracks. I only managed to get one of them on the whole trip. But I'm not focused on getting my limit each trip, so I was happy. I made a tentative date to meet Curt at this beach again the following Monday.
I went out again on Wednesday morning when the waves were calmer to try going to my favorite diving spot. On the way there, I saw a collection of brightly colored stuff on the steep shoreline below Vista Point. I wondered if someone was camping here, if a small boat had crashed, or if it was another kayaker. As I approached the spot, I thought I saw a large ribbed triangle of nylon. A wind-surfer sail!? But this triangle turned out to be a sleeping bag drying on a rock. There was this guy camped out on the rugged shore, wearing a heavy jacket. I waved at him, but he never responded. While I was sitting off shore, he started climbing along the beach to the south. Where he was camped, there was a wicked row of rocks just off shore. There was no way I could get very close or land to say hello. Farther south where he was heading, the shore was made of smaller jagged boulders with a steep slope into the water and waves breaking into them. Still no way I could approach the shore. I figured he was some kind of homeless person who must really value his privacy to hang out here. I left him alone and proceeded north.
My favorite diving place was too rough to dive in this day, so I went around the south side of the nearest big rock, within sight of my homeless person's camp. This area was sheltered from the waves, and had an almost submerged rock in the middle of a small cove. I tied up to the kelp and dove around the bottom of the rock. I never found any abalone, but the more time I spent there, the more comfortable I got getting close to the rock. If I had been this comfortable with the rocks on Monday, I could have gotten some of those nine inch abalone. My problem is this: If you get your kayak really close to a rock, you risk having a wave brake into it and knock you over. But if you are in the water, you are more likely to partake in the circular motion of particles in the water. In the water I can safely sit in places I would never feel safe in the kayak. I need to convince my hind brain of this.
The surge around this rock was very strong, and I eventually gave up diving here. In order to bring home at least a little bacon, I paddled south to the spot near the beach where I saw a few abalone on Monday. I dove five times, each time telling myself this was the last. Finally I found an abalone, and headed to the surface.
For the first time, I had the heart-stopping experience of getting tangled in the kelp. I was careful to look up and aim myself at an opening. I was diving at the edge of a kelp bed, away from the thickest part. But as I got close to the surface, something suddenly caused me to stop. My view above was clear, and my feet were not tangled. I could not tell at first why I had stopped so quickly. Looking down, I found a bull kelp "garden hose" spiraling around my torso. It had distributed the restraining force over such a large surface area that I never felt it constricting me. I poked at it with my abalone iron, but just stopping had caused it to relax. It slipped off and I continued to the surface. The kelp is a annual grower, getting thicker as the summer progresses, then disappearing in the winter. I have been telling people that I don't worry much about sharks, but the kelp scares me silly. I am going to have to get a diving knife to protect me from the vegetable kingdom.
On the following Monday, I went out to meet my new diving buddy Curt, but he was not there. He lives somewhere way inland, and must not have driven out. I decided to go out again and try getting close to the rocks right near the beach here. This did work fairly well, and I found two eight inch abalone just around the point. Again, my kayak was parked a safe distance away in the kelp. I had to swim quite a distance every time I caught something. So after I caught a second abalone, I left the rocks and tried diving around the kayak.
The macho abalone divers will tell you that you cannot find the "big ones" unless you go to remote places and dive really deep. When I went to buy my fins, I followed the advice of a diver I talked to last year and bought a pair with a large surface area. He told me that the large fins allow you to get to the bottom faster, giving you more bottom time. Of course these large fins caused my calves to cramp up easily and stay sore for days. But my calves have been getting stronger with all the diving I've been doing lately, and this problem was going away. Since I have the equipment for it, I figured I might as well try deeper dives. I also figured my diving skills had improved to the point where it was time to try going deeper.
After resting for a few minutes in the kayak, I dove four or five times out in the water right under my boat. Of course, it is difficult to document how deep I really went. One assent, I stood up off the bottom and followed a recognizable kelp strand up. As I swam, I tried to estimate how many body-lengths of kelp I was passing. Two meters pushing off the bottom, two more, then two more. Finally, I caught sight of the head of the kelp I was following, which I knew was barely visible from the surface. The visibility was good this far from the shore, around two meters. That totals up to a dive of about ten meters, my deepest ever. On one dive, my mask somehow managed to collapse the right hand side onto my face and seal itself off from the left side and from my nose. This was painful, but I managed to break the seal and re- inflate it without having to abort the dive. On the trips down, I was constantly clearing my ears: Holding my nose shut with one hand and blowing to equalize the pressure in the ear canal. On the trips back up to the surface, I could hear air bubbling and hissing back out of my ear canals as it expanded.
The air in my lungs also contracted, and without that full feeling, it seemed that I could actually stay down longer than I would have stayed in shallow water. I zoomed around on the bottom looking in cracks and around rocks, but didn't see even one abalone. So much for the advantages of diving deep. Next time I'm going back to shallower water.
