Last year I got certified to SCUBA dive, and this year I took an advanced diving class. We had one classroom meeting, and then met at Van Damme Beach for a weekend of camping out and real-life lessons. I figured I would get to do a lot of kayaking between lessons, but this turned out not to be the case. We were run all over the cove by Jon Valez, the instructor. This class involved underwater navigation, search and recovery, diving off a kayak(!), a night dive, a deep dive, not to mention a snorkeling dive and a checkout and review dive the first day. I was renting a tank from a nearby dive shop and had to drive back and fort to get it refilled when I might have been kayaking.
Fortunately I drove up early on Friday and could not resist getting in the water with my kayak for a late afternoon paddle. I knew that there were lots of nearby caves and hoped that the swell would let me go through them. I paddled across the north stretch of the beach and started out the rocky part of the coast. There is a house sitting on the top of the cliff here with a dent in the rock below it. Sure enough there is a cave here that runs under the house. I wonder if they realize how tenuous their foundation looks from this perspective. I sat behind the cave for a while and watched the waves. They were a little bigger than I would have liked, but I picked a calm moment and headed through. The cave was quite long and a medium sized wave came by while I was still inside but I easily rode it out and made it through. I think it would not have been possible to paddle this cave in the opposite direction were the waves could have surfed me out of control.
The next set of caves was one I remembered from previous trips, with several entrances. The waves definitely looked too rough here and I passed it by. Instead I recalled a series of channels behind the rocks north of the cove. One of these channels was the one where MAX went diving with us and found a ledge loaded with abalone. I thought I might look this place up and see if it was calm enough to dive for abalone this weekend.
I headed into these channels, pausing behind the rocks and in the little coves. The waves were pretty intimidating where they came between the rocks, but I recalled that there was always another channel around the next corner. I could wait for a window of calm and zip across to the next spot. Behind one of these rocks I watched some large waves churn up the next open area. I waited a little longer and a REALLY BIG wave blasted through. All the smaller waves had refracted to turn into the gaps between the rocks, but this one was big enough to come straight in across the channels from the northwest. I headed into it with butterflies in my stomach and prepared myself for my best brace. It was easier than I feared and I was able to ride it out. Then I looked around me and saw tons of water roaring down off the rocks all around. The wave had gone OVER most of the rocks I was hiding behind. I decided that I didn’t need to go into the next channel today.
I turned back and worked my way carefully back to Van Damme Cove. The water inside the cove is protected by a row of rocks offshore and I headed outside of these. I was hoping to find a reasonable “washover”, a shallow place where the waves break or surge over or between rocks. These are favorite places for radical kayakers to play and I wondered if I could find a safe looking spot where I could try this sport out. Somehow all of the gaps between rocks that I felt safe in today were also very tame and I didn’t end up having any og that kind of fun. Or any trouble.
Eventually I made my way to a large rock south of the beach and cut across to the cliffs of the shore. There are several caves here that I recognized, including the Cave Of Doom where I got knocked out of my boat once. This was a rougher day and I wisely stayed away from that cave. But nearby is the Cemetery Cave which I have never been all the way through. I joke that this cave is so named because of all the kayakers who died trying to paddle through it. But actually it is named Cemetery Cave because it leads inland to a sinkhole that opens up into the middle of an old cemetery. When I first saw this cave years ago it was jammed by a fallen tree. The last time I was in the neighborhood with BASK, Ken Mansardt went back with a bucksaw, sawed this tree up, and pulled it out of the cave. I was busy at the time or I would have loved to have participated in this trail maintenance operation.
The cave has two exits to the ocean and the part that turns inland is at an angle that prevents you from seeing all the way to the sinkhole. I watched the waves going in the entrances and meeting in the middle to churn up the water. It looked choppy, but not too bad. I paddled into the junction then turned around to face the waves and sat there for a while. A few reasonably large waves came but I was easily able to stay upright. I turned back inside and paddled through to the beach inside the sinkhole. It is spectacularly beautiful in there. The top of the hole is ringed by trees that hang a canopy out almost far enough to block the sky. The sides of the sinkhole are covered with bushes and grass and ferns that grow all the way down to the sand. The sandy beach covers the bottom of the sinkhole and slopes down to the water, which barely came out of the cave at the time of the tide I was there. I would have liked to sit in this wonderful spot for a while, but it was a windy afternoon and I started to chill down. I paddled back out and turned back to the beach and back to camp.
The next day we did a snorkel dive early in the morning as part of the class. Everyone caught a few abalone while we were on the bottom. I stopped at two because I didn’t want to have to keep them until the drive home. Besides, I still have an abalone or two in the freezer from last year and I keep promising myself I’m not going diving for more until those are used up. We did a SCUBA review and checkout dive in the early afternoon and then it was time to start cooking dinner. Everyone cooked up a favorite abalone dish and we went from table to table at the campground sampling each others preparations. I pounded a small abalone, cut it up into small pieces, and fried it in a little sesame oil with some onions and mushrooms. Then I added some vegetables, Mirin (Japanese sweet cooking wine) and soy sauce. My plan was to cook the Mirin and soy down into a thick teriyaki sauce, but the vegetables gave off too much moisture and turned it into a broth. So I renamed the dish sukiyaki and served it over rice anyway. Jon pounded an abalone whole, wrapped it in tin foil with butter, garlic, and some of my Mirin. He put the foil wrapped abalone back in the cleaned shell and put that directly on the coals. A few other people cooked their abalone in a more traditional way, slicing and tenderizing, dipping in egg, rolling in bread crumbs, and frying in butter. One guy used Ritz Cracker crumbs instead of bread crumbs for an interesting difference. A few foolish people brought side dishes like soup, beans, and potatoes. So there was way too much food.
After stuffing ourselves, it was time for class to continue. We had to stuff ourselves into cold wetsuits to go on a night dive. I have been on several night dives, most around the Channel Islands, and have never been in northern California waters at night. I had heard about the unusual behaviors of abalone at night but never seen it until this trip. The abalone wake up at night and climb up the stalks of the kelp. Even the ones that aren’t climbing sit around with their heads sticking way out of the shells and curving back. It makes them look like they are related to sea hares, which is probably true. Jon held a piece of kelp over the mouth of one of these abalone, and it took the morsel out of his hand! I tried to do this a few times but only managed to scare the abalone back under their shells.
Until just a few years ago, commercial fishing of abalone was allowed to continue in Southern California. Even sport fishermen were allowed to catch them while wearing SCUBA gear. (In northern California, you must catch them while freediving and holding your breath). Every time I go SCUBA diving in northern California, I see abalone almost everywhere. However, I went on several dive trips around the Channel Islands near Santa Barbara and you NEVER see abalone down there. I was on a boat with 30 other people, we all dove five or six times a day, including a night dive every evening, for three days. We never saw one abalone. But they say that the abalone used to be as plentiful there as northern California.
After that experience I found an article about the crash in the abalone population in southern California. Abalone reproduce by releasing their sperm and eggs into the water at random and counting on the currents to bring them together. So there has to be a certain concentration of adult abalone in a neighborhood for the probability of fertilization to rise above zero. Apparently commercial and sport abalone harvesting dropped the adult population below this threshold density eight or nine years ago. Since it takes seven years for an abalone to get large enough to take legally, nobody noticed that there were no new generations of abalone until the population of adults suddenly crashed.
The first few years that I went abalone diving, I never saw any undersized abalone. After reading about the southern California crash, I started to worry about this. Have we done the same thing in Sonoma County? Are there no more young abalone growing up to take the place of the adults? This still may be true in my home county, but not in Mendocino County. Everywhere we looked in Van Damme Cove there were undersized abalone. I found one rock that was covered with over half a dozen cute little abalone that were only five to ten centimeters in diameter. Not only that, but there were also plenty of legal sized ones everywhere. This is especially amazing when you hear the statistic that thousands of abalone are taken (legally) out of this cove every weekend. I had assumed that all the legal ones near shore had been picked over long ago at this rate. But on every dive we found adult sized abalone even 50 meters from the busy beach. This gives me a lot of hope for the continued abalone population in northern California.
The kayak population in Mendocino County is also booming. The last time I paddled past this beach, there were very few kayaks on the sand. But now, every red-neck has a kayak or two on top of his truck instead of a gun in the rack. Jean Severinghaus (of BASK) wonders which of these toys is most likely to get them killed, the gun or the kayak? The crowds of kayaks makes me want to go paddle someplace else. Most of the kayaks were there just to take people out to dive for abalone. Lost Coast Kayaks, a local outfitter based on the Big River across from the town of Mendocino, was there with several groups. They advertise cave tours, and the water was calmer on Saturday and Sunday than what I saw on Friday. I hope they got to go through a bunch of caves!