Just beneath the surface - waters off the coast of San Diego, California - Cover Story

Sierra, July-August, 1998 by Glenn Vanstrum

One by one, two by two, we gather in near silence on the sandstone bluff in La Jolla this bright February afternoon. Old friends murmur greetings, nothing more. A small knot of wet-suit-clad divers attends to a wreath of flowers down on the beach, only feet from the harbor seal haul-out. A few of the pinnipeds watch the activity, but most just stretch out, luxuriating on the sun-warmed sand. The ocean breeze carries the salty tang of kelp and the dank, gym-socks odor of seals.

A few feet from where I stand, a bagpipe player splits the clear day with the force of an ax blade, blowing an "Amazing Grace" so piercing that every one of the seals stares up at us and starts barking. Slowly, as if careful not to harm a single blossom, the divers slip the wreath into the chilly Pacific and start swimming for the open sea. With one step they've left the civilized megalopolis behind and entered the territory of the kelp forest and opal squid.

This city, the greater San Diego-Tijuana border complex containing some 4 million human souls, is my home. A Minnesota boy with a strong addiction to the wilderness, there is only one reason I've been able to stay here: the 64 million square miles of wilderness that borders the city, the Pacific Ocean.

After years of surfing, snorkeling, and swimming on the ocean's surface, I eventually conquered deep fears and slipped into the depths with a tank of compressed air. I earned my scuba certification in Hawaii, but soon learned that California diving is a different animal entirely. The sea is bitter cold and plankton clouds the water. But it's also home to a resplendence of sea lions, leopard sharks, and moray eels. City planners, showing rare foresight and wisdom, established a biologic reserve in 1970 along a section of the La Jolla coast, ensuring that at least a small slice of local coastal waters would remain pristine.

One day, while checking out a dive spot in the reserve called Second Reef, I watched a kelp-draped figure crawl out of the sea, a man who looked like Neptune himself Squinting up through weathered, sparkling eyes, handlebar mustache dripping saltwater, strands of sea grass stuck to his wet-suit, he broke into a Pacific-size smile.

I took the bait. "How was it?" I asked.

"Un-be-lievable, " he answered in a voice as rough as beach sand. "I'm down there at about sixty feet, sixty feet, you understand, and I feel this pecking at my shoulder. I turn, and do you know what it is?"

"A kelp bass?" I ventured.

"A cormorant! Un-der-water!" he said. "Can you believe it? A bird! And he's pecking away at my mask--peck, peck, peck, like he's trying to figure out what I'm doing down there. Can you be-lieve it?"

The man was Ron Starkey, soon to be a good friend, a veteran dive instructor still full of amazement and joy at the life to be found under the sea. If it wasn't a cormorant at 60 feet, it was a pair of tame moray eels wrapped around his neck, or an inflamed garibaldi defending its nest. It was Ron who spurred me to forget the cold and poor visibility of the Eastern Pacific and just go diving.

Ron took me on my first night dive. On a moonless night we waded out into the wilderness away from the glow of a seaside restaurant. The incongruity of it struck me--inside, elegantly dressed men and women were sitting down to an expensive meal, while a few feet away we were slipping into the cool black ink of the unknown. In short order, Ron showed me a cusk eel burrowing into the sand, a brawny lobster dancing along the bottom on ballet legs, and a round stingray. He scooped the ray up and held the stinger and tail, letting me touch the sandpaper-like skin, then gently released it. We turned off our lights, and an iridescent violet and yellow jellyfish wafted by, all but invisible, shimmering amid trails of glowing plankton.

And it was Ron who introduced me to the magnificence of the kelp forest. The ocean off San Diego is blessed with the world's fastest-growing plant, really a brown algae, Macrocystis pyrifera. Able to grow 2 feet in a day, kelp creates dense forests in water from 20 to 130 feet deep, its holdfasts gripping the bottom. In and around these "trees" live (or once lived) marine mammals, fish of every description, and invertebrates from holocanth to cephalopod.

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have shown that the local kelp forest thrives on nitrogen from treated sewage wastewater discharged miles offshore. This was not the case with the Palos Verdes Peninsula bed, once 30 miles long and now 30 years gone, which fell victim to untreated pollution from Los Angeles. Although San Diego's kelp is healthy, the animal life that makes the beds unique has been decimated. Abalone once carpeted the bottom between holchasts; today the tasty mollusks are so depleted that four of the five species are in danger of local extinction. Sea otters, which eat the urchins that eat the kelp, are long gone, hunted out in Southern California. Overfishing and the use of gill nets, now outlawed, have destroyed local populations of sheeps-head, rockfish, and bass.