Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
tally nuts to be doing this. I swam down cautiously through the dark,
and finally rocks came into view, and on them was all the marine life
I was familiar with. Now that I was in their reassuring presence I felt
comfortable and began to look around.
There were two-spot octopuses (
Octopus bimaculatus
) cruising the bot-
tom for food, and fishes huddled for the night in crevices between the
boulders. A sheep crab (
Loxorhynchus grandis
) drew up its claws defen-
sively when the bright light hit it. Soon I spotted the first lobster crawl-
ing over the boulders: its red color stood out beautifully in the bright
car headlight. Apparently my presence or the light made it nervous,
though, and when I made a grab for it the lobster shot o¤ backward
with amazing speed and disappeared into the dark. Whoa! This was not
going to be as easy as I thought! Lobsters don't just sit there waiting to
be picked up. Cruising on a little farther I spotted another one, and this
time I grabbed it with all the speed I could muster. It worked; I now
had a firm grip across the back of the frantically flapping lobster.
Returning to the surface I found the ski¤ and Norman, who had the
challenging job of trying to follow my bubbles and the electrical ca-
ble in the dark. I tossed the lobster over the gunwale into the boat.
Back down I went, and by the time I ran out of air we had six nice lob-
sters crawling around the bottom of the ski¤, the largest weighing about
eight pounds. This night diving was all right! For seventy-five cents'
worth of scuba air and our time, which in those days was dirt cheap,
we had a gourmet feast for a number of people.
B UILDING A TICKET TO EXPLORE
The little ten-foot ski¤ with its often unreliable seven-horsepower out-
board engine had proved to be fine for diving in calm, nearby areas
with a maximum load of two pretty lightweight people, but I was anx-
ious to see what lay farther afield. The coasts o¤ the Palos Verdes Penin-
sula and Catalina Island were well outside the safe range of my little
ski¤. Norman and I decided to build a boat that could take us to those
exciting places twenty miles away.
Norman was working at the time for the Los Angeles Department
of Water and Power and had a reliable income. I was still going to UCLA
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