My brother Paul and I belong to a local dive club called JAWS (Just Add Water, Sonoma) and the club does an annual camping/abalone diving/SCUBA diving weekend at Van Damme State park in Mendocino County. This is always a great time and an abalone feast, so I signed up to go for the first day and a half (I had another appointment on Sunday morning). On Friday evening I drove up and slept in the back of my van so I could get up early with everyone else and go on an abalone hunt.
At 8:00 AM ten of us with kayaks met at the beach. We paddled a few kilometers south to go to a protected cove that was known for abalone in shallow water. Paul and I left early and we stopped to look into the “Cemetery Cave”. This is a beautiful cave that leads to a sinkhole in the middle of an old cemetery. The walls of the sinkhole are covered with ferns and is a beautiful spot known to kayakers as a nice place to stop for lunch. Paul agreed and said that this was the sort of place that people travel to Costa Rica in the hopes of finding. When we came out of the cave, the rest of the group had just about caught up with us and Paul highly recommended that they go in and take a look. Several people went in one entrance to the cave, then went right back out the other side. But four or five of the other kayakers went all the way down the cave to land on the sandy beach in the sinkhole and admire the spot.
The protected cove did turn out to be an abalone hotspot. Most of the divers went to the south end of the cove behind a near-shore island, while I preferred the north end where there was a bed of bull kelp. I put on my gear and discovered that I was in only two and a half meters of water. Sometimes my flippers hit bottom when I was hanging straight up on the surface! There were abalone here under my kayak but they were all just barely legal. These seven inch abalone are called “clinkers” because if your abalone iron “clinks” on the widest part, then the shell is considered of legal size to take. I paddled over to the edge of the near-shore island and dove down looking for larger abalone.
On my first dive I found and took two abalone that looked huge but turned out to be under eight inches. Then I calmed down and started diving looking for larger ones. I could not resist taking two more that turned out to be only eight inches. Everyone else reported the same thing, there were plenty of legal abalone, but none of them were particularly large.
With my limit safely in my goody bag, I started swimming around and diving just to sight-see. Several times I saw a harbor seal swimming by in the kelp, but they swam away before I got too close to them. Paul quit with only two abalone and came over to join me sight-seeing. I watched one harbor seal dive down under me and slip into a crack under a rock. It’s flippers were still visible sticking out from under the rock and it just sat there for a minute. I dove down to take a look and was able to pet the seal while on the bottom of the ocean! I looked under the rock and the seal just looked back at me over it’s shoulder when I did this. Later two seals swam along the bottom and looked up at Paul and I on the surface. When I dove down to join them they disappeared.
We all paddled back to camp and stowed our gear and prepared to go out for a SCUBA dive. Six of us strapped our SCUBA gear on our kayaks and paddled out of the protection of Van Damme Cove to do a dive in the open ocean. There was a strong wind offshore, but we were supposed to stop just outside the cove between the reef and the offshore buoy. I had borrowed a large “mushroom” anchor that was designed for a Zodiac, figuring it would hold a kayak in the wind. When we left the cove, three of us slowed down and paddled along the outside of the stony reef looking for a good spot.
Three kayakers had apparently misheard the directions and kept paddling into larger and larger swell towards the buoy. At first we figured that they would eventually notice us and turn back, but one of the kayakers got knocked off his boat. He tried several times to get back on and failed each time. I zoomed out to help him and learned that he had never tried to get back on a kayak before. He had rented the kayak just for this weekend to try one out. I helped turn it right-side up one more time, and told him to pull himself over the kayak until he could drop his butt into the seat, then swing his legs around. The trick is to keep your center of gravity low.
As soon as he was safely back in his boat, I looked up and saw a terrible sight. One of the other kayaks was floating nose up with the rear apparently full of water. We all converged on this boat to find the owner pulling his tank and buoyancy compensator (BC) out of the boat and inflating it to keep it from sinking. He handed this over to me and I tied it to my boat. It turns out that he tried to cram these into the rear hatch but they didn’t quit fit, so he just strapped the hatch down with a few inches of space between it and its seal. In the increasing swell on the open ocean the rear of the boat filled up with water and sank. The only kayak in the group that had any flotation bags in it was mine. When the boat tilted nose up, a 30 pound weight belt slid down into the rear of the boat and jammed itself there beyond our ability to pull out. Through the open lower hatch a procession of equipment drifted out and rose to the surface. I snagged a snorkel and two gloves. Paul snagged a hood. The owner of the boat pulled out a spear gun and handed it to me to save for him.
The owner of the boat put on Paul’s mask and snorkel so he could see what he was doing. The upper hatch on the boat blew off and the boat filled up with more water and started disappearing on the large waves. The owner grabbed his boat in one hand and Paul’s boat in the other and saved his from sinking for a critical few minutes. George, another diver, put on his BC and tank and swam over to assist in the salvage. He stuck his spare regulator into the lower hatch and filled the boat back up with some more air so it floated a little better. They managed to get the upper hatch back on and tried to fill the boat with more air. Unfortunately the upper hatch would burp air every time a wave pushed the kayak down a little, and they never managed to get the boat filled with enough air to float correctly again.
One diver named Mike (not me) paddled towards shore to get help from someone with a Zodiac. We gave up on trying to save the boat and concentrated on saving the diver. Paul and I gave him back his hood and gloves to help him stay warm. George gave him a PFD to keep him afloat. The upper hatch on the boat kept its seal well enough that it seemed to be stable. When the accident first started, the current and wind pushed us closer to the rocky reef with breaking waves. If we got too close we would have abandoned the boat and towed the diver out to sea. But as we approached a gap in the reef the current turned around and pushed us out to sea. As we waited for a power boat to arrive the buoy came closer and closer and passed us by. We became concerned about getting washed out to sea and started organizing things for a tow to shore. I would be the first to tow the diver while Paul would carry the BC on top of his boat.
Fortunately, a Zodiac arrived before we were ready to go. They pulled the diver out of the water first, then his tank and BC, and even went back and pulled his kayak out of the water and saved it as well. We didn’t pay too much attention to how this was done because we were heading for shore as fast as we could. The Zodiac with rescued diver and boat made it to the beach before we did. As we approached the beach we heard a siren go off and watched a fire truck come down Highway One. It turned out that this was for our benefit. After Mike had found someone with a Zodiac to go out and assist, he felt obligated to tell a ranger what was going on. He told the ranger that we had the situation under control and didn’t need any help. The ranger turned around immediately and called for all possible assistance on his radio. Of course the first to arrive was the fire department, and they arrived after everyone was safely back to the beach. Just in time to follow us around and pump us with questions to help them fill out all the paperwork that was now necessary.
When things calmed down and we had a chance to rest, four of us still wanted to go diving so we paddled across the cove and landed on a little beach next to a cave I have kayaked through several times before. Our plan was to dive off the beach, paddle through the cave with flashlights, then follow the shore around the cliffs and back to our little pocket beach.
The cave turned out to have shallow water and was so short that we really didn’t need the flashlights. When we came out the other side we finally found some deeper water and dove down to 40 feet. Here we found a bunch of abalone that we could not take because we were not free-diving. Some of these abalone looked so fat that they didn’t look like they could fit back in their shells. I tested this hypothesis by banging on one abalone with my flashlight. When it tried to hide inside its shell from me, it left 4 centimeters of flesh exposed all the way around! Mike (the other Mike) said that these abalone were legal (over 7 inches) in the vertical direction, not just in the horizontal shell direction!
We had a little trouble finding our way back to the beach, but surfaced a few times to get our bearings. I had a little trouble with my BC and Paul accused me of not managing my buoyancy. When I got back to the beach I discovered that a rubber seal was missing where my fill tube attached to the BC, and I effectively did not have any buoyancy. If we had managed to do the kayak dive earlier, I would have sank straight to the bottom and become the one that needed rescuing! It was lucky that we did a shallow dive where I didn’t particularly need the buoyancy.