46 years later

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That grocery cart has a fan the future is here.

 

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Purple urchin collecting: pro tips and techniques.

Greetings purple urchin divers. This thread is the place for people to read up about the tools, techniques, and tips to remove purple urchins. This is a sticky and can be referenced at any time. Some things you will need: 1. Valid California fishing license. 2. One or more large green Trident...

scubaboard.com

40 gallons of sea urchins a day? now I want to dive in CA, the water never looked welcoming at the beach but apparently there are endless fields of sea urchins - which I don’t eat, or abalone, but would be cool to see! Like a little underwater Easter hunt. That’s good news for sea urchins! Makes me happy to hear they are thriving.

Now riddle me this if you will - sand dollars, their little skeletons were at the beach before, but then I stopped seeing them - what happened to them?

 

[FormerAbDiver]

Thanks for sharing that. It's a heck of a contraption. Questions. I assume Australia has size limits on Abs. But I don't see either the diver or the tender measuring them. Are there just so many "obviously" legal ones that measuring isn't needed?

Maybe our waters had that abundance back in the 60's, I don't know. But we measured probably 40% of the ones we took- both in the water and then once again in the boat. Any that were undersized were put in a dive bag and sent back down to be placed where the abalone would survive. And our Ab Irons were at least twice as wide as the pry-bar that diver is using. That insured we wouldn't accidentally cut their foot when we pried them off the rock, in case we had to put them back. I heard tell, but can't confirm, that some divers would even put a piece of kelp in the Ab's mouth when they put them back so they'd have something to eat.

A local welder friend of mine, Steve Tilford of Tilford Welding, welded up probably all of the Ab Irons used by commercial divers back then. I believe he started with an automobile leaf spring. He'd cut it to length. It already had a curve to it being a leaf spring. He weld a T-handle on one end for us to hang on to and then along the sides he'd weld extensions on both sides, one set for blacks and one set for reds, and I think a third set for pinks. If you could put the Abs between the extensions they were too short.

And we wanted the measurements to be so insanely precise that when Fish & Game checked our Ab Irons with their Go/No Go Gauge we would be good, but we could take everything that was legal. Our precise measurements that Steve did for us were based on the outside air temperature, not the significantly colder water temperature, and yes it makes a difference.

I wish I still had that Ab Iron, I have no idea what I did with it. A cool piece of nostalgia for sure.

 

[FormerAbDiver]

...now I want to dive in CA, the water never looked welcoming at the beach....

It's not, at least it wasn't when I dove off the beach around Santa Barbara and Goleta. Usually 4-6 feet of visibility (at least back then). Now the Channel Islands, where I worked commercially, was always 30-40 feet- sometimes better, which for a California diver was fantastic.