It's more bad news for California's abalone divers:
Already having missed a whole season in 2018,
they won't be able to go again for at least two more
years. Last month, the California Fish and Game
Commission (CFGC) decided to keep the state's recreational
abalone fishery closed through April 2021 to
give the shellfish population a chance to bounce back.
They based the decision on low density surveys from
key sites along the North Coast.
The season is usually open from April to
November for recreational diving north of San
Francisco, but has been limited in recent years and
was closed completely last year. The trouble really
began with the El Niño of 2014-16, which sparked
extreme environmental conditions for coastal environments:
a massive kelp die-off and exploding numbers
of purple sea urchins, which compete with abalone to
eat the bull kelp left the slow-growing sea snails starving
and not reproducing. Last year, the CFGC changed
the rules to allow recreational divers to take up to 20
gallons of purple sea urchins a day from the waters off
Sonoma and Mendocino Counties to see if that would
help in the recovery of the bull kelp and abalone. (In
one case, experienced divers used a vacuum device to
suck the creatures from the ocean floor.)
A group of avid abalone divers has generally
expressed support for the continued closure, but some have asked that a small number be allowed to fish to
continue collecting data -- and to keep the sport alive.
Lifelong abalone diver, Steve Rebuck of San Luis
Obispo, criticizes the CFGC for not taking more action
sooner, like when the abalone density surveys indicated
that the population was dropping in 2012, partly
due to an algal bloom that killed a lot of them the year
before. "It was clear it was a problem," Rebuck told
the San Francisco Chronicle. "The department didn't
really address it correctly, in my opinion. They wanted
to keep the fishery open."
Abalone were once so abundant, San Franciscans
plucked them from tide pools and cooked them on
the beach. Overfishing caused the state to stop commercial
fishing in 1997 and to allow only recreational
fishing of the shellfish, and only north of the Golden
Gate Bridge. Red abalone is the only species that can
be fished now.
Abalone divers have been commiserating in
Facebook groups about the continued closure of the
wild fishery. A Sebastopol diver recently posted: "I
am just an old abalone diver who is dreaming of getting
some more abs before I die." Who knows when
-- or if -- that will ever happen, as it's probably safe to
say that Northern California abalone populations will
never be as abundant as they once were.