Awesome abs

About 30 years ago my dad let me take scuba diving lessons and he learned at the same time. We used to go out diving at the kelp beds in San Diego and hunt for abalone. Sometimes we got skunked but we usually managed to get a few nice abalone if we made three dives. Now days they don’t even allow the take of abalone south of San Francisco because there are so few left.

Let me tell you this place we are at now is just awesome for abs. We first came here a few years ago on vacation mostly just passing through, that is when I heard that there are abalone here. And that is also when I started planning for the time I could come see if I could actually get an abalone again. It's been over 15 years since I got one of the tasty creature...

It is not allowed to take the abalone using scuba gear so you need to free dive for them or by rock picking. Five days in a row we both got our limit. That is a lot of abalone! Ben is getting good at finding them and prying them off the rocks, and let me tell you that is no small feat. Low tide is the time to go "rock picking" as they call it.

We just suit up and go feel the rocks below the surface of the water until we feel an ab, then we pry it off and measure to see if it’s at least the legal size of seven inches. We are allowed to take three each per day but not more than 24 in a year. It is very regulated and with good cause. There are a lot of poacher out trying to ruin it for the rest of us. Every week there are reports of the game warden arresting someone or a group of people poaching. To do it legally we need to buy an abalone card. It has 24 tags and we must attached a tag to each ab as soon as we take it out of the water. We write down the date, time and location we took the abalone on the tag, and again the same info on our card.

My good friend Joe used to go ab diving with me often when I first learned to scuba dive and I wish he could be here to see this place.

It seems like the ab hunt takes the whole day even though we have been getting back by 9:00a or so with our limits. First I need to clean the wetsuits, then we go to the this cool cleaning station the RV park has set up for cleaning the abs. After we get them all cleaned and sliced we need to start the soup, made from the trimming, and pound the slices. It’s a ton of work but oh so worth it!

Have you ever eaten Abalone?

Bill