Point Bennett

We had to get a couple or three weeks of diving abalone and 20 landings each year to renew our permit.

I shouldn’t speak for Jon, but the reason that he and I were diving at San Miguel Island in February was to get our days in, before the ab season ended March 1. We had spent several trips diving San Miguel on the Moki , diving the Foul area, Bennet point. Hell, Jon jumped the bell bouy off Adam’s on one of those trips. We were doing OK , diving deep a lot, and making some money in some of the roughest ocean we could find.

I was in my twenties and Jon was about a decade older. Jon didn’t worry too much about white sharks; he had already been in the mouth of one when he was diving at the Farallon Islands. Jon was chewed up by Whitey and had crashed his motorcycle a couple of times. But Jon thought I had a death wish, so he tried to offer what help he could . I had my own boat at the time, but sometimes it helped for two of us to split expenses of fuel and what it took getting our landings in. I was young but already had plenty of stories. At some point I decided that keeping track of close calls with death was bad luck, so I quit counting. But no, I didn’t have a death wish . Neither did Jon. We drank too much, we guessed too much about dive times and carried a lot of residual nitrogen from too many consecutive days of diving. We had fun, we pushed it really hard. We lived.

Before we had dive computers to keep us from getting bent, we had something we affectionately called a ‘Scubapro Bendomatic”. It consisted of a dial that rose the longer and deeper you went. It was never intended for repetitive dives, and we would push our decompression limit three or four times a day with the “ Bendomatic.“ Needless to say, most of us got bent at some point; some of us got bent several times. Hopefully you could get your fins, mask and weight belt on and keep it together long enough to swim down the anchor line until the bubble was compressed. It took some willpower and some desperation hanging off, and not knowing if the bubble would come back when the cold and boredom finally forced you back up on the deck. Jon, who worried about me, didn’t ever wear a Bendomatic. Jon never wore a dive computer even when very accurate ones were invented, and Jon dove for more than four decades before the bends caught him. Other than making the hobble in his walk a little worse, Jon tricked death once more.

Near the end of our run diving red abalone, near the end of February, near the end of the day, maxed out on residual gas from consecutive days diving deep, my meter said I could make one more hop over the side into eighty feet on the depth meter to finish the trip. Your brain is flashing red but you keep everything even, everything steady and calm, and settle into filling the ab bag. The bottom was sloping deeper and the reds kept coming as I worked at a place I never saw before, or ever saw again. The abalone were big and I didn’t need to measure them. The ab bag filled up with three dozen, but the abs just got thicker so I started sticking them to the outside of the bag, to each other, to my chest, until I had too many to float up with my float bag. I pulled in the hose, three pulls, Chris Van Der Ree was tending, he got the hose signal and began pulling me up.

But this isn’t a story about getting bent, it is a story about the best spot I ever saw, and never saw again. It is a story about having more abalone than my float bag would float at 85+ feet . It is about knowing that a decompression stop would have been a good idea, but instead, going up where Chris and Jon could pull up my bag and help me peel the abs off my chest before I got out of the water. It was the end of that dive season. We did look there again, but time, memory, the kelp edge , or maybe the abs just moved on . We never found that spot again.