On a foggy morning late last summer, I find myself at Caspar Cove, an inlet in the cliffs halfway between the towns of Mendocino and Fort Bragg, on the North Coast of California. Sonke Mastrup, former deputy director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and my occasional dive buddy, leans on his tailgate, pulling scuba gear out of a black plastic tote. On the beach ahead of us, a sandwich board covered in pictures of the highly invasive and prolific purple urchin sits propped in the sand. It displays their territory, their morphology, and the recommended tools—gloves, ball-peen hammers, scissors—for smashing them.
Mastrup and I aren’t here for fun, and we aren’t here for fishing. We’ve come to Caspar to kill urchins—and lots of them.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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If you ask Mastrup why we’re doing this, he’ll launch into a complex description of inter-tidal ecosystems, explaining that volunteer-driven urchin slaughter will help the bull kelp, a keystone species here. If you ask Jon Holcomb, a 50-year veteran commercial fisher and as salty a seaman as they come, he’ll tell you about his self-built underwater vacuum, called an airlift—how it can suck up purple urchins by the thousands and how he hopes that using it will lead to the resurgence of the North Coast’s iconic red abalone fishery. If you ask Josh Russo, head of the Watermen’s Alliance, and Tristin McHugh, kelp project director at the Nature Conservancy—together, the organizing force behind volunteer dives like ours—they’ll tell you that urchin culling in specific regions like Caspar Cove creates seed banks for bull kelp, bastions from which it might regenerate en masse. Kelp loss has turned the North Coast near-shore ecology on its head, depriving nearly every species from crabs to rockfish to seals of food and shelter. Since 2020, the state’s Fish and Wildlife has granted special permission for recreational divers to cull urchins in Caspar Cove and one other location, Tanker Reef in Monterey.
To help the kelp forest rebound, we have a lot of killing ahead of us. Good killing, we tell ourselves. Killing that’s probably, maybe, hopefully helping. Murder an urchin, save the ocean.
As to the question of what we do over the next couple of hours, it’s simple. We suit up, swim out to the south side of Caspar Cove in a 52-degree ocean, and descend about 30 feet. When we reach the bottom, purple urchins—hard-shelled creatures up to four inches wide, their shells covered by a corona of sharp spikes—dominate the moonscape-like mono-habitat, sometimes clustered so thick that they pile onto one another in clumps. We putter along, gripping our ball-peen hammers with neoprene-clad fingers, smashing urchin after urchin until we run out of air.
Urchin killing is monotonous, and it’s a strange feeling to destroy in order to preserve. I don’t think I’m doing this because I’m absolutely sure that if I kill enough urchins, it will offset the impact humanity is having on the ocean. But I believe in trying.
As an adversary, purple urchins are frustratingly resilient. They burrow into crevices, making themselves impossible to smack; smacking them the wrong way hurts, and more than once, I’ve come back from a dive with clusters of spines in my palms, elbows, and knees. When they run out of food, as they often do in altered ecosystems like Caspar, they go into a kind of zombielike starvation mode, lasting years with hardly anything to eat. And even when eradication efforts do beat them back, they’ve been known to retake territory in as little as a month, micrograzing the rocky seafloor in hordes, even eating the rock itself with their sharp, beak-like mouths.
This dive with Mastrup is the first time I’ve been in the water in over a year (baby-having being not so much a dive-compatible activity), and after we spend most of the air in our tanks smashing urchins, we decide to swim over and check out the territory of previous culls. It looks like a substantial raft of kelp has taken hold: Telltale knobby floats bob in the swells, and as we approach from beneath the surface, I notice that the sandy bottom changes abruptly to multicolored seaweeds. From this carpet, strands of bull kelp rise to form a thin and elegant forest, and black rockfish swim lazily among the long, straight stalks. Beneath the shifting seaweeds, I catch glimpses of anemones, nudibranchs, rock crabs. The abalone are big and fat, and as the sun comes out, its rays streak the underwater scene in stripes of gold.
This is what all the fuss is about, I think. This is what we’re trying to save.
Weeks later, I learn that Fish and Game is extending the free-smash permit at Caspar for another five years and that the kelp actually is coming back. What I saw with Mastrup wasn’t a fluke. One day, I want to take my daughter underwater and show her the forest there.•
Kailyn McCord writes on the North Coast of California, with recent support from the Ucross Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. You can find her work at Literary Hub, Ploughshares, and The Masters Review, with more at her website. She’s on Instagram @kkmcwhere. When not writing, she likes to be outside.
