Over a year ago I returned a weight belt to Dan Leak that I had borrowed while I was learning to dive for abalone. Ever since then I have been promising to take him out with me and only recently did we manage to pick a date. Dan used to abalone dive from shore and has been interested to try it from a kayak. I didn't want to make Dan paddle too far so I suggested that we go to Fort Ross and paddle north looking for a good place away from where everyone else dives close to shore. The prediction was for mild waves and The Fort Ross Cove was very mild as Dan successfully launched my old Frenzy kayak into the ocean.
We paddled north while I ran the abalone model in my head. (If I were an abalone, where would I want to hang out?) I saw some places that looked good but there were divers down near the shore or in the water already. Finally I saw a rock too far out for a shore diver to get to. It didn't have bull kelp close to it, but there was a shallow area north of it with some kelp around that. We knew it was shallow there because waves broke there from time to time. We paddled out and tied up to the kelp a little farther from shore than where we saw the waves break.
I put on the rest of my gear and got in the water to organize things on the side of the kayak. I should have known better than to hold several things in my hands at once. As I tied the caliper to the kayak I never even noticed when the strap for my abalone iron slipped out of my gloved fingers. I tried diving twice to find the iron with its bright day-glow handle but discovered that the bottom was around 10 meters deep under the boat. On the first dive I didn't even make it to the bottom. It has been around eight months since my last dive and I was not in condition to dive that deep. That abalone iron is lost forever.
Dan discovered that he gets sea sick in a kayak. I suggested getting in the water to see if that helped, but he quickly got back into the kayak. He had to give up on diving today but vowed to try it again soon with some Dramamine. He loaned me his abalone iron and I went off to try my luck. Dan's abalone iron was a traditional one actually made out of iron from and old automotive leaf spring. I found holding the wide end of it uncomfortable after a while and missed my narrow-handled aluminum "iron".
When I first started abalone diving, I would easily get exhausted in the water until I learned to relax on the surface between dives. One way is to hold onto the nose of a kayak, but when I do this my feet always rise up under the boat until I am doing a back-float. The snorkel is designed for looking down into the water, so it doesn't work in this position. This time I discovered that I could relax in this position and breathe through my mouth as I rest, as long as I'm careful about closing my mouth as waves wash over my upturned face. My usual relaxation position is lying face down in a dead-mans-float with my snorkel out of the water. I used to lie in this position telling myself that I would dive again as soon as I caught my breath. After lying there for five or ten minutes, I would have to give up waiting and dive anyway, even though I still felt too tired and out of breath. A few times on this trip I actually felt strong and oxygenated and ready to dive! Practice at this does improve my ability, even after a long hiatus since the last season.
I swam towards the shallower water, to find a depth that I could do on this day. The water had looked very clear in some of the deeper places, but here it was full of some little round algae things. The visibility was reasonable, perhaps two meters with occasional glimpses to three meters. In one of these glimpses I saw the rocky bottom through the murky water and dove down. As I expected the water was only three meters deep so I turned towards the kayak and found the edge of the rock. It dropped down to about six meters and there I found several long cracks in solid rock, running parallel to shore. These cracks were lined with abalone, like an abalone supermarket.. I took my time and popped off the largest one I saw and brought it to the surface. It turned out to be eight inches, well over the seven inch limit. I paddled back to the kayaks and showed it to Dan. He was paddling in place, still tied up to the kelp, to see if working lessened the sea sickness. I suggested that he follow me back to the shallow water and save me the work of swimming back and forth to the kayak.
This tuned out to work extremely well for me. I could dive and search around for that crack and wherever I popped back up to the surface, my "float" would come over to me under it's own power. Dan never recovered enough to dive, so I told him I would dive only two more times and then we would head back. On every dive I found that crack again, or one just like it, and got an abalone. On my last dive I had time to stop and pop off a second one before returning to the surface. That second abalone turned out to be barely legal, but still OK. Since I now had my limit, we could head back to shore. But first I had to swim back to my kayak. I was holding onto Dan's kayak, doing the back-float resting trick with my body lying under his keel. Dan started paddling the boat while I caught my breath. I felt the kelp snag on my head and shoulders a few times, then slip and slide under me as we moved. A few times I paddled with my fins to help. About the time I felt ready to swim the rest of the way, I looked up to discover that Dan had paddled us all the way back to my boat.
It had been a foggy morning with a few hundred meters of visibility in the air when we left. While I was diving the fog had closed in until there was less than a hundred meters of visibility. This made it difficult for Dan to follow the sea-sickness advice to stare at the horizon. I miss-counted points in the fog on the way back and turned in too early for the cove (wishful thinking) but recognized where I was when I saw a white buoy float. We paddled around the next point and made an easy landing in the correct cove. We sat around for an hour resting to see if Dan could recover enough to try diving from shore, but he eventually decided it was not going to happen. We made plans to try again in three weeks. Since I really didn't have much use for four abalone I gave two of them to Dan so he would not go home empty handed.