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Do you think that fisherman are good stewards of the oceans? Or that they put the welfare of the fish stock they seek to catch ahead of their own financial interests? This is a cautionary tale about people who fish for a living whether they are from Africa, Indonesia, Japan or Hawaii.

I grew up in a fishing family — three generations of it. My great uncle Barney Clancy started the first abalone diving business in California after World War II. He named it “Veterans Fisheries” because  he sought to hire veterans to help him pick abalone off of the ocean floor.

In the beginning, they were hard-hat divers, and they worked boats out of San Simeon (near Hearst Castle) and San Pedro in Southern California. They were called the “Black Fleet” because of their boats’ colors.

In the years after the war, they were known to pick 200 dozen of abalone per boat per day. The pickings were good and plentiful, and no thought was given to the damage that was being done to the species itself. The supply seemed endless.

Then in the late 1950s and into the ’60s, the catches started to diminish. They had to ply further up and down the coast for their harvest. Fifty to 100 dozen then seemed to be a lot. Still, no thought was given to the word conservation. The idea hadn’t been invented yet … consumption ruled the day.

The most commonly caught abalone (haliotis) was the green abalone. If you ever saw a cigarette ash tray in someone’s home, it was most likely made from a green abalone shell. At one point, they were the most plentiful.

When pickings started to become harder to come by, workers began to pick pink and pinto abalone, also known as Sorenson’s abalone. In the end, that species almost became extinct and nearly impossible to find. The mainstay abalone were nearly as scarce. Boats began to work further offshore around the Channel Islands, then to the islands beyond the horizon of the channel islands — Guadalupe and San Nicholas.

When the green abalone began to give out, the divers and the now hundreds of commercial abalone dive boats switched to red abalone. It was a bigger species that brought more money, but divers had to go deeper to get them.

To this end, they gave up hard-hat diving and moved on to hookah diving, which consisted of a compressor on the deck that supplied oxygen to the diver who now wore a wetsuit, a simple dive mask, a regulator and fins. He was more mobile, and the operation was cheaper. He only needed a crew of two — himself and the line tender whose job it was to make sure the compressor stayed on, the 200-foot hose didn’t get tangled up and to pull up the bag of abalone when the diver had filled it.

Boats was anchored during divers’ work. You didn’t need the boat to be running live so the hard-hat diver could have range and mobility. That meant one less crew member. The picking of abalone was becoming more streamlined as the abalone itself was becoming more difficult to find. It’s called the evolution of a business whose sole job was to end the life and the bloodline of a snail.

All Good Things Come To An End

My pop and his brother were so proficient at gathering up those little gastropods that they were known as the “Gold Dust Twins.” But just as in life, all good things come to an end — especially when you are working like hell to make it so.

By the time I arrived on the scene after the Vietnam War (working on my pop’s boat was the only job I could handle after being a scout for the U.S. Marine Corps and carrying around my own sad baggage), the sea snail known as abalone was on hard times. Unable to replenish itself (they are very slow growers— just ask anybody who runs an abalone farm) because the authorities didn’t protect them like they should by imposing strict catch regulations, like size per species, or no shallow diving under 20 feet where the abalone were thought to have their young.

It wasn’t like the California Fish and Game Commission wardens were lazy, it was just that they were too few and their big slow boats were outgunned by the much faster models that could hit speeds of 30 knots. Because of arcane ocean rules the Fish and Game guys had to be able to pull up next to you and order you to stand down, which was nearly impossible because of the speed difference. Everybody outran them like moonshiners avoiding the feds.

In the end, Fish and Game decided that saving the sea snail was the only choice it had and put a stake into the abalone business, closing down commercial diving for abalone for good in 1997.

By the 1980s, abalone beds by the thousands contained no abalone large enough to pick. it was easier to find a gold nugget than a legal-sized red or green abalone. Things were so bad that divers were walking beaches on the backsides of the channel islands picking black abalone off of the rocks at low tide. They looked like so many Oreo cookies jumbled on top of each other and tasted like hockey pucks.

To my pop’s credit, he refused to become a “beach walker,” as they were derisively known among the divers. Even to the divers who had done irreparable damage to a snail who simply wanted to live its life on the underside of an underwater rock, this was too much.

Finally, recognizing the environmental disaster in front of its face, Fish and Game decided to pull the plug on the whole thing. Hearings were held up and down the coast of California. Divers routinely testified that there were still plenty of abalone out there, that the species was alive and healthy. Furthermore, if there were population issues, it was because of those damn sea otters. They ate everything in their path. If we could somehow get rid of them the problem would take care of itself.

If playing the otter card wasn’t bad enough, they argued that the coastal cities of the state would suffer economic disaster if you put the haliotis ahead of humans. They argued Fish and Game was trying to upend the long-standing rule that everything on the planet served man.

In the end, faced with overwhelming science and data, Fish and Game decided that saving the sea snail was the only choice it had and put a stake into the abalone business, closing down commercial diving for abalone for good in 1997. In the end, the victory went to the snail.

I really believe fishermen love the ocean, love the life they live and want to leave this planet in good shape after they are gone. The pressure of making a living and providing food for their families plays a large part in all of this.