If you like the freshest abalone, try diving off the California coast. But don’t forget to update your will and insurance policy

RANDY FRY'S LUNGS BEGAN to burn as he swam along the ocean floor on a fading breath of air, 5m below the Pacific Ocean. The water was dark and frigid and this was one of Fry’s first free-dives in nearly a year. As carbon dioxide built up in his bloodstream, the 50-year-old Californian craned his neck towards the light and kicked hard. When he finally broke the surface, he took a big gulp of air and basked in the glorious afternoon.

Fry and his friend Cliff Zimmerman, 58, had dropped anchor in the cove at Kibesillah Rock, a Godzilla-sized sea stack 16km north of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County, California. Diving buddies for 30 years, the two men had chosen Kibesillah because the waters around it teem with a rare and coveted delicacy: a saltwater mollusk called Haliotis rufescens, commonly know as red abalone.

So far they hadn’t found the huge “abs” that Zimmerman had promised – a trophy specimen is shaped like an oblong plate, 25cm across – and Fry was getting impatient. As the two wetsuit-clad men bobbed in 14-degree water a meter apart, Zimmerman turned to him and said, “The big ones are right below me.”
Fry smiled, bent at the waist, and disappeared into the olive-green water.

Seconds later, Zimmerman watched in horror as the green churned red. He felt the buoyant push of something enormous. Then, less than a meter away, the dorsal fin of a 5m, 1,800kg great white shark bulged to the surface.

Zimmerman swam as fast as he could to his boat and radioed for help. Within minutes, three helicopters and three boats arrived at the scene, but they didn’t find Fry’s decapitated body until the next day, August 16, 2004. Two and a half weeks later, his head washed up 3kms away.
Though Zimmerman had watched Fry plunge into oblivion, he still dives for abs, and he’ll tell you without hesitation that his friend, “died doing the thing he loved best.”

Northern California’s abalone season runs for seven frenzied months, April through November, with a July respite to ease fishing pressures. Each year an average of four people die in the waters. The last two years on the north coast have been particularly grizzly: at least 14 fatalities from a community of roughly 32,000 divers, a per capita death toll nearly four times that of skydivers.

By law, an abalone diver is a free-diver (scuba tanks are not allowed), but sometimes a thick wetsuit and two lungs filled with air aren’t enough to keep a diver alive. Victims can get caught in kelp and drown, or get knocked by heavy surf into rocks. Heart attacks are common; shark attacks, although sensational, are not. Ab masters, grizzled old men with a patina of ocean salt caked into their crow’s feet, will tell you it’s not a dangerous activity, and in most cases they are right. Others more circumspect say it is a little more than coincidence that abalone season opens on April Fool’s Day.

Some openers are worse than others. People still talk about 1994, which saw 6m waves and 10 rescues before noon. During 1995’s opening weekend, Roger Rude, a 55-year-old retired lieutenant with the Sonoma County sheriff’s search and rescue team, watched two men walk right by him and straight into the ocean while he unsuccessfully gave CPR to a young man who’d just drowned.  “I couldn’t prevent divers from going in the ocean,” says Rude “so I would ask them for ID before they got in the water so I would know who to call when they died.” Rude filmed the pair getting smashed onto rocks; eventually they hobbled back to shore, lucky to be alive. “I wanted some footage for public education purposes,” Rude explains, “what not to do.”

Because the divers just keep on coming. Very little about an abalone’s physical appearance suggests it’s worth the risk. The 70-million-year-old lichen-covered, barnacle-ridden, mollusk-in-a-half-shell spends much of its life crammed into dark crevices eating seaweed. The edible part of an abalone is actually its foot, a tough, slimy muscle it uses to clamp itself onto the ocean bottom.

Still, abalone is a delicacy. It has a delicate and unique taste – not as chewy as calamari or as sweet as a scallop. “What does abalone taste like?” says Zimmerman. “It tastes like abalone.” There’s nothing fishy about it: abalone can be baked, grilled or eaten raw. The most common method is also the simplest: slice it thin, dip it in egg and bread crumbs, and flash-fry it in olive oil with garlic. Fresh from the ocean, though, abalone is tough as a new catcher’s mitt and tenderizing calls for creativity. One popular method seems almost criminal: take a two-by-four wrapped in a pillowcase and pound the slime out of it.
The 60-plus species of abalone are scattered along temperate coastlines worldwide, with significant populations in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Japan. The largest is the red abalone, topping 30cm in diameter, which ranges from southern Oregon to Baja California in the United States. It was collected commercially until 1997, when a combination of factors, led by gross over-harvesting, resulted in the closure of the industry. Today, abalone in the US can only be taken for recreational purposes (divers are allowed three per day and 24 per season) and only along the coastline from north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to the Oregon border.

Poachers, however, routinely ignore such regulations. The recreational industry generates US$14 million in revenue and the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) estimates that the black market is just as large. Black market abalone can fetch up to $100 and violators range from recreational divers pawning off a few abalone, to sophisticated rings moving tonnes of mollusks, both domestically and internationally. “San Francisco is one of the easiest places in the world to sell illegal abalone,” says CDFG Warden Scott Melvin.

To test that theory, one April afternoon I went door-to-door in San Francisco’s Chinatown soliciting offers for an abalone a friend had given me. Within one hour I found three interested restaurateurs, one of which offered me $90 for the 1kg of meat. Poaching abalone – it’s just that easy.
California’s illegal abalone problem, however, is little more than a playful game of hide-and-seek compared to South Africa’s. Though Haliotis midae is smaller than its Californian cousin, the appetite for it in international markets – particularly China – is larger. “The black market abalone trade is far and away the biggest wildlife problem South Africa faces,” says Markus Burgener, South African program officer of the global conservation group TRAFFIC. According to law enforcement officials and the South African Revenue Service, the illicit $150 million industry is fueling an explosive drug trade driven by sophisticated crime syndicates.

South Africa once had a thriving abalone trade. In the 1995-96 season, the commercial industry harvested 558 tonnes of abalone. Because of poaching and a dwindling abalone population, just 68 tonnes were taken commercially in the abbreviated 2007-08 season. Meanwhile, South Africa’s Marine and Coastal Management (MCM) estimates that 900 tonnes of abalone were poached in 2007. In response, the South African Revenue Service launched a national campaign to investigate and prosecute poachers for tax evasion violations, which carry stiffer penalties than poaching violations. In 2006, former president Thabo Mbeki addressed the issue in his State of the Nation speech. In May 2007, Haliotis midae was listed as a CITES Appendix III species, making its importation illegal without a permit. The recreational industry was closed in 2002 and in February 2008 the government shut down the commercial industry.
Still, with abalone fetching more than $200 per 500g in Asian markets, the hunger for this unassuming mollusk has turned the spectacular Western Cape coastline (and its vibrant capital, Cape Town) into one large and messy crime scene.

Some poachers, in lieu of monetary payment, accept drugs for their ill-gotten gains. When I asked Inspector Keith Thompson of MCM what drugs are bartered for abalone, the wildlife cop reeled off a pharmacy of illicit substances – crystal methamphetamine, marijuana, ecstasy, heroin – which are then sold in the local communities. Crime rates rise when the weather gets bad and poachers can’t dive. Black market activity percolates throughout communities, down to the kid skipping school to make pocket change as a lookout. “The illegal abalone trade is destroying these communities,” says Burgener. “It’s creating a climate of lawlessness and a thirst for easy money. What’s going to happen when there’s no more abalone?”

Most of South Africa’s abalone leaves the country bound for China, though it often takes a circuitous route. According to CITES, between 2004 and 2006 about 79 tonnes of abalone entered Hong Kong from Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe; Swaziland and Zimbabwe don’t even have coastlines and Namibia is the only country to produce even a small amount of abalone, through mariculture farms.

Burgener says Hong Kong diners can help curb the sale of black market abalone. “When consumers ask questions about where abalone comes from, it helps put pressure on the supplier. If people demand abalone that comes only from a legal source it has an impact.”

With so much at stake in the global abalone trade, I wanted to get a first-hand look at what all the fuss is all about. So one bright and sunny May morning, I went diving at Kibesillah Rock, a four-hour drive north of my home in San Francisco.

The locals told me I would be the first one to dive there since that shark ate Randy Fry. This wasn’t surprising, given that the only way to get there without a boat involves a long walk across private property, followed by a 30m rappel down a crumbling cliff.

The approach alone is enough to keep most people out. Facing the Pacific Ocean at cliff’s edge, with my back to a thick stand of redwood trees, I remembered something Cliff Zimmerman had said: “There are lots of things with goddamn teeth around here. Mountain lions and bears in the hills, sharks in the water.” I grabbed the rope, slid down the cliff, and dove Kibesillah alone.

The water was murky, even in the deeper sections at the mouth of the cove. Though the wind was mild, a storm had passed through earlier in the week, so the runoff, combined with choppy seas, made searching for abalone difficult. Eleven-degree water drizzled down my wetsuit as I took three hard kicks to the seafloor. A wave rolled through the cove pushing me to shore, then it sucked out towards the open ocean, dragging me with it. Sand and kelp and pieces of shattered sea urchin floated around. My mask smashed into something. The bottom. Time for air.

For the next hour I was an aquatic yo-yo – down, search, up, repeat – with no abs to show for it. At one point I dove to the bottom for a game of benthic Braille, bumped into something round and hard, slipped my abalone iron (a glorified crowbar) under it, and pulled up … a rock.

At the surface, I thought of Zimmerman’s last words to Fry: “The big ones are right below.” I turned my back to shore and started kicking out to where Randy Fry made his last dive.

I took a deep breath and pulled myself down a cloak of kelp, scouring the rocks with my hands until I came to a barnacle-covered shell. I popped the abalone off the rock, and tucked

it under my arm; as I kicked through murky water column towards the surface, my lungs began to burn.