PASTURES OF HEAVEN

Paradise and Smuggler's Coves
South San Clemente Island, California
Nov 18-19, 2000

Dive Report by Steven B. Harris


We had been bound for the Cortez Bank, an underwater "island" off the coast of Southern
California, where a sea-mount reaches within 15 feet of the surface. Alas, the Fall weather has
been windy, and the chop out on the open water has forced us to give up on the Bank and take
a detour to San Clemente, a California "channel island" which is nearby. On the South coast of
the island are several nice coves, and the cliffs above them, now acting as our windbreaks, look
barren and wild. I see a few jeep and goat trails, but that is all. Someone tells me that this part
of the island is military land, on an island controlled by the Navy, but fortunately they usually
don't close the waters to recreation, except during special exercises. On the map, we see that
there are all kinds of off-limits zones like military chemical munitions dumps off the coast of
California, in these waters where the depth may go from 2000 ft to 60 feet over a few miles. As
for San Clemente Island, it has a few tens of the thousands of people on it, although none are
visible. I know little about the place other than that Richard Nixon maintained a house there
during his tenure in office, and for half dozen years of exile after, during which he brooded over
his memoirs and his phlebitis. The Channel Islands inhabit a large expanse of Pacific. If they can
accommodate nerve gas bombs and Richard Nixon, there ought to be a sheltering place for us,
too.

We are anchored in a nice stretch of calm water, about a mile offshore below the deserted cliffs.
The cove where we find ourselves must have some interesting submarine rocks, for we can see
a plume of spray called "The Boiler" in Pyramid Cove, caused by some kind of hidden
outcropping below. All around the boat, the reddish fronds of giant kelp, near the peak of their
growing season, lie just under the surface.

We are aboard the charter fishing and dive boat Horizon, at 80 feet the largest and nicest live
aboard I've yet to see in California. If a ship is a hole in the water into which one pours money,
as the saying goes, the Horizon bespeaks of a great deal of money-- and some thoughtfulness as
well. Everything on the boat is ship-shape, and doubly redundant. I can even see that there's
been some thought to making sure the backup systems are made by different companies. As I
see by the labels, only one of the two large auto-inflating life-raft barrels on the top deck is
made by Goodyear. Among the dozens of antennas, I see two radomes: even the 45-mile
radars (Qualcom, Raytheon) are twinned. The ship's twin diesels give us a 1500 mile range, so
the captain tells me. The margaritas we get at the end of the dive day seem to be loaded with an
extra shot of Tequila, and I suspect that my bar tab, which I've avoided asking about so far, is
also going to be a double shocker. One has to pay for all that equipment somehow.

The dive site the Captain has picked out today is a bit deceptive, in that it's hard to tell from the
surface that the bow of the ship is in water which is 20 feet shallower than the stern. But that is
what the sonar and the underwater map says, and we even have a drawing thoughtfully put up
with magic markers on the ship's dive board. My bud and I tell the dive-master that we're going
to explore the bottom above 60 feet, and swim for the green water at the deeper end of the
ship.

Underneath, I've never seen such kelp forests. The thick clumps of Macrocystis, some so large
as to easily hide a diver, go up for 60 feet and more. Below the kelp we find a complicated
series of shelves and overhangs of rock, all made as for an underwater diorama. Here I see a
little cave that looks like it should have a treasure chest and perhaps a few mermaids. Black sea
urchins everywhere are sunk into individual hollows in the rock. I have no difficulty believing that
they make some acid which eats the rock away, for each urchin sits in its own depression, as
though it was a warm object dropped into a dirty snow-bank. And not only urchins, but
occasionally urchin shells. I've seen these squat spheroids with their odd 5-fold symmetry before
in curio shops, but seeing an intact one next to the living animal it represents, makes it appear
somewhat more skull-like. This is not something urchins grow out of, but what is left after they
die a natural death. If there are any urchin-eating otters here near San Clemente, I've yet to see
any sign of them.

There are garibaldis and less easily identified fish everywhere. I follow my dive bud as we
leisurely swim along various outcroppings, until we reach the sandy bottom. Here I casually look
at the depth, expecting to see that I'm at 60 ft, only to find with a shock that this sunny sand is at
94 feet. We've violated the dive plan, and at this depth we will run out of bottom time in about
15 minutes. Clear water has its problems. I point at my buddy's computer screen for emphasis,
and we head for a promising outcropping considerably "uphill." The scenery here all looks the
same at any depth.

Tooling along in shallower water I spot something on a rock shelf I recognize: a dark purplish
shell shaped like a circus big-top tent with a small hole in the top, just large enough to fit in the
palm of my hand. It's a limpet, and I pull it away more easily than I expect to. Perhaps I've
caught the animal traveling. It's basically a snail-like critter, and underneath the shell it sports
orange gastropod flesh, like an abalone. It must eat a lot of carotenoid-rich algae. The hole in
the top of the animal is the other end of its GI tract, now clamped shut. There's a large pucker
factor to being ripped away from one's moorings. I try to restore the limpet only to find that, like
so much ocean life, it's neutrally buoyant and won't stick. I leave it sitting on its side, and
wonder if limpets, like some turtles, have difficulty righting themselves.

The shallower shelves of rock off the island are loaded with Eisenia, the southern sea palm, a
plant which specializes in growing in places with a current too strong for the larger kelps. These
plants look like miniature date palms only 2 or 3 feet tall, growing horizontally out of rock face
before making a gentle bend to turn their fronds upward into the sun. True to their niche, the sea
palm holdfasts are much stronger than those of the giant kelp, and the stipes of the plant are
woody and thick, allowing them to be used as handgrips against the current. Hey, these things
are diver handles! It's something that ought to be included on every reef. For a while I practice
holding onto a sea palm with my fins held together while the surge is going in the direction I don't
want to go; then going into a fins-out frog-kick when the surge goes my way. I can see the
tumbled heads of all of the sea palms nod in one direction in time with the current. Soon I find
I'm flying along the cliff face like a helicopter over trees on an island shore. It's hard to believe
that these thick and woody plants are annuals which will all be replaced by next year. Indeed,
it's hard to believe that even the giant Macrocystis kelps 60 feet and more tall, are no more than
seven years old. Everything here grows with exuberance not seen on the land.

Surfacing, my buddy and I find that we're farther from the boat than we'd intended to be.
Swimming with the current and refusing to follow the bottom has put us out quite a ways. We
give the boat the okay sign, but they send the tender out anyway, wanting some experience. My
dive bud, who swims a mile in a pool several times a week, makes it to the end of the tow line
before I do, so the tender nabs just me. How embarrassing. I spend the short journey back
sitting on the bottom of the boat with an aluminum fungo bat on a lanyard which appears to be
part of the little boat's equipment, possibly for clubbing sharks which come into the boat
attached to divers.

Lunch is sandwiches served to divers who have shucked themselves out of just the tops of their
suits, and now sit moistly in the ship's main dining hall. My dive bud has managed to pull her
head out of her drysuit neckseal with some difficulty, so we won't have to use the threatened
obstetric forceps. For myself, I have decided that the 60 F temperatures of the water are about
the limit of comfort for me wearing only a T-shirt and swimtrunks under my 7 mil neoprene. For
California Pacific winters I'm going to need my own drysuit, or at least thicker gloves. We eat
ravenously, grousing about leaky masks and other equipment problems. On this dive we've both
been necklacing both our primary and backup regs using snap-away cat collars, and decide we
like the system. We are a long way from equipment perfection, but we make some minor
progress with every dive.

Soon we're out again, and I wish I hadn't eater so much lunch. The next dive drops us down
onto a sandy flat, in 40 feet of water. Visibility must be at least 60 feet, for kneeling on the
bottom I can see my dive buddy clearly as she slowly descends, having a little more difficulty
than usual clearing her ears. On this dive I will actually have two dive buddies. My usual buddy,
Ms. Bite-Off-More-Than-She-Can-Chew, is now joined by Mr. Quick, a mutual friend who is
a respiratory therapist, mechanical whiz, and computer network manager. We had introduced
Mr. Quick to scuba, thinking it was a natural sport for him, and he has taken to the sport like a
duck to water. Now he has more logged dives than both of us. He's along today slumming with
us, the less experienced.

We head this time deliberately toward the island, sightseeing. At one end of the sandy flat we
see the reason for a buoy we had spotted in the water earlier. It marks a 4-gang lobster trap
with some lobsters in it, huddled against the wire. My dive buddy hates to see animals trapped
and would probably like to set these free, but she apparently restrains herself, and we pass on.

As we get to shallower sand (only 15 ft— I'm almost snorkeling) we begin to see more and
more of some kind of emerald-green sea grass, which I think is probably eelgrass. In some
places this plant grows two feet long and as lush as any grass along a fence by a brook. I pick
up a grazing sea-slug and watch its four eyestalks retract like those of any other snail's. The
genus Aplysia has a big uncomplicated nervous system, and has been the centerpiece of
neurobehavior studies for many years. How long, I wonder, will this creature remember me?

There are many animals here. Mr. Quick has spotted a spiney lobster in a small outcropping,
and thinks he has it cornered. Catching it proves to be about as difficult as catching a cornered
cat, however. I watch as he goes for it, and the swimming lobster levitates directly upward along
the curved shelf of rock, over the hunter's head, then dives directly down into the sea-grass
behind us, which swallows it whole. Mr. Quick gamely goes after it, and I see him waist deep in
the waving grass, madly parting shocks of it here and there. But the lobster is gone.

The view is now of underwater meadow. The sea grass here grows everywhere, and in some
large sand-channels eroded by the surge, it is possible to swim along 20 foot-deep sunken
ravines where the eelgrass grows thickly below and on both sides of the diver. For a few
minutes we swim down tubes of grass, an underwater pasture which appears a small paradise to
us. Sea grass, unlike the kelp, is a colonist to the shallows from the land, and perhaps that is the
reason why it looks like it doesn't quite belong in the ocean.

Not surprisingly, the sea grass doesn't occupy a large niche. As we descend and swim away
from the land, the grass is replaced by volcanic-looking rock and sea palms again. Now we see
a surfeit of lobsters-- one in nearly every hole in the rock, all seeming to watch us. I grab for
several of them and miss, but Mr. Quick, not to be thwarted, will eventually get a nice
specimen, perhaps 10 inches long. He lets me take it by the carapace, and its five pairs of
splayed-out walking legs tense upwards against my hand. It feels like a really big captured
grasshopper. I offer it to my other dive buddy to examine, but something about the roach-like or
spider-like nature of lobsters sets off ancient alarm bells in her brain, and she wants nothing to
do with the bug.

I haven't gotten a chance to look closely at a spiney lobster before. This one is an odd critter
with no "lobster claws," but only a small pair of crab-like eating claws. There are two large
main feeling antennae, like those of a stag-horn beetle, and two smaller forked antennae below,
which I have been told are for smell. The reason that lobsters are so easy to spot turns out to be
that they're painted up for exaggerated effect like stage-actors. I don't know much lobster
biology, but my guess that perhaps they must try to impress each other for mating purposes. The
animal is a dusky red, but I see that it sports a bright orange racing stripe down each leg, clearly
put there so that the leg can't be missed visually. It certainly isn't there for my benefit, but it is
certainly there for something with eyes. What appear to be two wide eyes on the lobster's
"head" I now see are not eyes at all, but yellow eyespots with artificially painted dark "pupils,"
like the fake eyespots on a caterpillar. These are for somebody with good vision, too. The
actual eyes of the animal are just above, two unimpressive bulbs set on stalks. These are in turn
protected by spines which project forward over them, like horns. Or like the overarching tank
valve protectors of a cave-diver. The spiney can swim backwards and swivel those eyes to see
where it's going, but strands of kelp will be guided up and over the eyestalks by the horns, so as
not to snag. Cute.

None of us can legally take lobster, which require an extra "ocean enhancement" sticker on a
California fishing license (the permit sticker for ocean fishing with tackle is yet something else,
another example of California bureaucratic tangle). So we drop the spiney, and it flashes away.
I've eaten enough lobster tail to know that lobsters swim in much the same way that chickens
fly-- a short anaerobic sprint which can't be sustained for long. The fast-twitch muscle in the tail
of a lobster is white for the same reason that the breast of a commercially-bred chicken is white:
there aren't enough mitochondria to darken it. Still, like the sprint of a cheetah, the swim of a
lobster is impressive while it lasts.

Our bottom time now reads 40 minutes, and due to our shallow path we have some air time left.
At the end of the dive we're descending again and finally we come out on the last scene: a sandy
flat in 45 feet of clear water, with a giant red-brown kelp in the middle of it, going halfway to the
surface. This kelp doesn't rise upward directly from its holdfast like the usual giant kelps, but
instead splays out like a tangle of bent pipe cleaners or bottle-brushes. We see strands the
diameter of a human thigh twist their way along the bottom, before finally angling lazily upward.

We've come upon a large specimen of the feather boa kelp, or Egregia, and we spend of bit of
time examining it. The center of each 50 ft strand is a narrow ribbon of red-brown algae, with
tiny gas-filled float pods. The feathery kelp filaments extend bushily from this, giving the plant its
common name. Supposedly the calmer the water, the more feathery are the strands. We are so
much used to seeing the more familiar vine-like Macrocystis going straight upward, that the
feather boa looks somehow moth-eaten and diseased. It lies along the bottom like a dandelion
dying from weed-killer, finally tugging as listlessly upward as a wilting helium balloon
advertisement at a car dealership. But that's the way this species is. But it's probably a perfectly
healthy plant.

At last, though we're not happy about it, it's time to leave. In the end, only the spear fishermen
are unhappy that we haven't made the Cortez Bank—the rest of us are quite satisfied with the
diving. We have only one reservation: although we have spent two days diving the South end of
San Clemente Island, we have see no large sharks. We know they are in the area, and we
know that in the area there are "shark dives" in which the animals are chummed out for tourists.
We decide that the next time we come back, we want to see teeth.

We pull ourselves out of diving suits a last time, and secure them where they won't flap away
while the boat moves. Riding back toward out berth in San Diego we watch over the stern of
the Horizon as San Clemente disappears slowly in the distance. We've yet to see a raindrop,
and the sea is ultramarine blue. Every now and then, a few black and white blotched dolphins
pick us up and play for a bit off our bow wake. Eventually, there is the expected spectacular
red sunset into the ocean. Ahead lies seafood pasta, a few more mango or traditional lime
margaritas (God, that bar tab…), and a videotaped movie to be watched with many tired fellow
divers. If only there were slaves at the dock when we get in, waiting to hump our tanks and
gear all the way out to our pickup, and then drive us home in the night. But that's not the way it
works in scuba. When it comes time, we do it ourselves. And when we finally do get to our
beds, we close our eyes only to find ourselves still feeling the rocking of the boat, before we
drift off into the dreamless sleep of the exhausted

SBH