Christmas (Shell)fish Story.

Well, I went to the Cove today and went out on mussel point, on the seaward side. The waves coming in were large rollers, so I was a little apprehensive, but I found long ago that you can always get mussels at low tide. There was a minus 1.5 five at 5:00 P.M or something like that.

I started out on the rocks about 3:45 so the tide was still going out. I like to follow the tide out. That way you can always come back to shore. If you go out at low tide you can sometimes find yourself stranded out on the rocks with water coming up around you. I hate when that happens.

The mussels that you can get along the shore are small and picked over. The farther out that you go the larger they get. The big ones are on the last rock in front of the breakers. I worked my way out, picking a few of the larger small mussels, while building my confidence that I wasn’t going to get skunked. I watched my favorite rock for about ten minutes and no waves were breaking over it and it was pretty well drained off so I sneaked out and got my limit of the larger mussels.

My wife was mad at me for taking chances, but I assured her that it always looks worse from the shore, in fact I felt fairly safe or I wouldn’t have done it.

I usually take a rip hammer with me to pry the mussels of the rock but all I could find was a claw hammer. The claws are too curved, and don’t slide under the mussel that you want to pick. Always take a straight clawed rip hammer, or make your own tool like I used to do. You don’t feel so bad when you lose a cheap homemade mussel pick. I never lost one, so I don’t really know. I’ve lost a few Abalone irons back in my diving days. We use to make our own abalone irons out of old buggy springs, there was an abundance of springs on my Grandmothers ranch in Laytonville.

Anyway, I found the slight element of risk to not be unlike when my cousin and Oregon and I used to go diving for abalone. Time was usually the biggest factor in us going diving. Finding time was always a problem, so when we decided that we had the time we went, no matter what the weather. Oregon didn’t care about the tide but I did, I liked to dive at low tide, there is usually two of those a day so it worked out.

We would usually get up very early for the morning tide, then talk about how we “didn’t care how damn rough the ocean is, we are going to get our abalones.” We went diving in some pretty rough weather and sometimes we didn’t get our limits, but I don’t remember ever getting skunked.

One time in particular, Oregon, Bob, and I went diving off Dehaven Creek in Mendocino. We did the typical banter about getting our abalone, no matter what. When we got there, it was blowing a gale, but we decided that it wasn’t that rough. So we decided to go out. This was one of those times that it looked even worse after we got out there. The wind was so strong that we were being pushed back to shore from our diving tubes catching the wind. When the waves would break, they were breaking over us. We were taking turns diving one at a time because it was impossible for one guy to hold two tubes, let alone three. Finally one of the tubes got away from us and blew clear onto the beach. That was encouraging, so we let another tube go and started diving two at a time. The waves were breaking over us and we had to hold our breathes until the spray from the comb died down. When we came up from a dive we were allowing extra breath just in case we came up in a raft of foam that we couldn’t get our heads above. We soon found that the rip current was so strong that we couldn’t stay on our rock, but pick a new one down current every dive. It wasn’t long until we were pretty much exhausted, then we found that we had blown clear off the rocks, so we swam in.

When we got to shore we gathered up the two other tubes and put our share of abalone in each one before we brought them ashore, just in case the game warden was watching. In retrospect, that was pretty funny, I doubt that the game warden even suspected that somebody might be diving that day. He was probably home toasting his toes by the fire.

We talked about it later and decided that maybe we shouldn’t have done that, but we all had abalone dinner that night, which is a great consolation prize for not getting our complete limit. Now as a side note: I should tell you that there was a hell of a lot of abalones back in the 60s, if you could find a rock, you could find an abalone, so we were fairly sure that we could find a rock out there if we would just go out. Fun times!!!