The Last Urchin Diver

Conner Rhoads steers the small boat he built with his own hands—a 24-foot Radon, christened Moanilehua after his sister and best friend—through the waters surrounding a rough, tan island that juts from the sea. Its cliffy shores compose one link in the chain of a harsh archipelago sculpted by extinct volcanoes, submarine landslides, and the skeletons and shells of oceanic dead stuff—islands as great seaborne burial mounds that house their own species of tiny gray fox. 

Through his windshield, he scans the turquoise shallows for glittering patches of kelp, which he reads like a language, discerning not only the algae’s presence, but also its lack: the tatters and holes eaten by the predator that is his prey. Less than a decade ago, these kelp beds were jungles, great forest rings that stretched for a mile out to sea, so thick that divers often would get tangled in them and have to hack themselves free with knives. Years of ecological flux—warming waters and rabid overharvesting and grazing—have tipped the balance of this delicate biome, and he now scavenges the remains.

Rhoads’ inner ear rings, damaged by pressure. His knee aches from a motorcycle crash a few years back. At home, his wife, Bella, is round with their first child, a boy months from his first breath. Each of them barely 30, they have defied the odds to scrape together their first mortgage in an old port town where gentrification has driven many locals into exile.

Of course, there are bills to pay, new ones coming, and old medical debts due. The couple’s home recently flooded and requires tens of thousands of dollars in repairs. And Rhoads’ father is always in the back of his mind—the everyday question of whether he’s still alive. 

Rhoads switches off the engine and drops anchor. He wicks his pits with grease and peels a heavy rubber suit, tattered at the knees, over his 6-foot-2 frame, then yanks on combat-style dive boots, size 14, like some kind of punk-rock biker of the sea. His garb contrasts the boat’s happy blue paint and the bright-yellow hose coiled at her stern—his breathing tube, attached to the air-compression system, which allows him to stay underwater for hours. 

He inhales through the hose, steps through the mirror, and bubbles off into the abyss. The world flips upside down, goes silent except for his breath. He sinks through a liquid green sky past massive glowing cornstalks that filter sunbeams like psychedelic visions in an underwater breeze. Calico bass, bright-orange garibaldi, hideous sheepshead with humanish teeth—untold fish float past. They disinterest him. 

His focus is lasered on the black stars that spangle the floor of this inverted world: urchin. Up close, encrusted into cracks and under ledges of reef, they appear as plum-colored spike balls, clinging to the rocks by their teeth. With his rake, he plucks them free, then plops them in the large green net he drags along the ocean floor. 

The word “urchin” traces through the Middle French herichun, meaning “hedgehog.” Crack open a sea hedgehog’s shell and, after a gush of water, you’ll find a cluster of five plump, beady morsels that uncannily resemble golden tongues. 

One of the few remaining delicacies harvested from the wild, this nutrient-rich uni is actually gonads, which are slurped and adored for their creamy-yet-granular texture and sweet, nutty taste. Mmm. The uni of these waters, dubbed “California Gold,” features as the most expensive menu item at high-end sushi restaurants from Tokyo to LA.

His haul will fetch Rhoads a tidy sum from suppliers—but only if any number of hazards don’t interfere. Down here, sharks can eat him alive. Visibility can drop to zero, abandoning him to a milky gray fog. Currents so strong they turn the kelp sideways can slam him into the reef, trap him in caves, or sweep him away, stranding him miles from his boat. 

On his way back to the surface, the unloading of the ocean’s pressure can induce the infamous “bends,” decompression sickness, which can turn his blood into fizz, forming nitrogen bubbles that can catch in his spine or brain and paralyze or kill him. Tangled hoses and busted air systems can leave him breathless on the ocean floor, forced to choose his preferred way to die: drown alone in the dark or race up toward the light while his blood explodes.

Rhoads’ bag is getting heavy. When it’s full, sometimes weighing hundreds of pounds, he’ll inflate a white float to launch it to the surface, where his catch will be scooped of its treasure. He reaches to pluck another specimen—but the sight of the urchin in his glove has disappeared. 

In its place, more swiftly than his brain can convert raw perception into something like causation, he sees a white blur—just bubbles rushing past his mask with a terrible sense of speed, faster than he knew he could move through water. Like a fish on a line, he is being reeled upward, far too rapidly to decompress. 

When he gasps to the surface, he sees another boat—his breathing hose slashed and tangled in its propeller. Seven dudes pack the deck. Clearly, they don’t understand the meaning of the red-and-white flag flying from Moanilehua: diver at work. They shrug like fools when he gestures to them. “Kill your fucking motor,” Rhoads orders. This, they understand. 

With pins and needles setting into his fingers, he cuts himself free from the prop. The boat immediately speeds off: a maritime hit-and-run.

Rhoads returns, slowly, to the bottom, to both recalibrate his blood and offset the creeping bends, and also to salvage his catch—good money abandoned on the ocean floor. Despite all its wonder and spectacle, this is, after all, his job, and today he will take a loss. 

Very slowly, he returns to the surface and, steering with his palms because his fingers don’t work, guides his boat back from Santa Cruz Island as his extremities numb and burn. Once ashore, he immediately checks himself into the hospital, where he spends 24 hours alone with his thoughts in a beige chamber, decompressing and worrying, more than anything else, about the bill.

*

Rhoads grew up with a 7-inch hard-shell urchin (as big as they get) as the star on his family’s Christmas tree. This was 60 miles northwest of LA in Silver Strand, Oxnard, a foggy old surf-and-fishing ghetto nested on a mile-and-a-quarter-long strip of beach where the water is strangely blue and clear. 

Caged in by the Channel Islands Harbor to the north, a shipwreck to the south, and the barbed-wire fence of the naval base on its inland border—with one road in and one road out—“Strand” is distinctly isolated, which for many years made it a kind of crusty time capsule for a throwback surfer’s way of life. 

“A little white-trash surf spit,” Rhoads affectionately calls his old home. Also, “a shithole.”

Back when the boat traffic wasn’t lethal, and beachfront homes meant sand fleas and moldy bread, Strand was a place where surf-kid “Strand Rats”—Rhoads among them—roved the blocks in packs, waxing windshields and stuffing twigs into the keyholes of the cars of out-of-towners. Insular and indigent, the neighborhood proved to be the perfect incubator for an intense strain of localism, made notorious by the 2001 sentencing of a 32-year-old local to nine months in jail for responding to a drop-in by a 19-year-old from neighboring Port Hueneme by, according to the LA Times, “paddling up to the teenager, yanking the intruder’s board leash and spearing the teenager in the face with the tip of his own surfboard.”

I sure hope I don’t have to fight a 40-year-old man today! Rhoads would think to himself each morning as a prepubescent, bracing for the paddle out. 

Indeed, the waves were worth protecting. Though Point Conception and the Channel Islands limit Strand’s exposure, on a pumping winter swell, you might be forgiven for mistaking “the bowl” at Mid Beach for some distant, sand-bottom cousin of Pipe. This strip of sand launched the careers of Timmy Curran, former world number six and lander of both surfing’s first backflip and alley-oop, and Rhoads’ good friend Nick Rozsa, the cult-hero ripper whose stunning talent once drew credible comps to Dane mf-ing Reynolds.

If being a Strand surfer sounds intimidating, consider its shore-bound alternative: broken homes, addiction, the listless angst of daily life. Rhoads counts five friends who died due to overdose, two within a hellish 24 hours when he was 16. As a fidgety Strand Rat, you either channeled your fury into fishing or surfing, or else you risked slipping into the murk of despair.

*

Though Rhoads inherited urchin diving from his father, Boobala, he didn’t learn the trade from his old man, who’d fallen off the wagon by the time Rhoads began working alone at 14. Instead, Boobala’s old diving partner, Eyeball, initiated Rhoads into the industry. 

“Uncle Eyeball is like my second dad,” says Rhoads. Though not technically related, he calls Eyeball “uncle” in the way the language of family extends to inseverable friends. “I wouldn’t be here without him,” he adds.

Remaining calm while deep underwater for long periods turned out to be the perfect transferable skill to riding large waves.

When his uncle and father originally linked up, it seemed written in the stars that they shared ocular nicknames. Eyeball was blind in one optic orb. Boobala, once a talented diver and hard-charging surfer himself, got his ludicrous moniker in adolescence from a catatonically stoned friend, who couldn’t stop pointing and laughing at his “boobly” eye. As partners, they joked that together they possessed the vision of one good diver. 

The oddball pair chased the “Bluewater Gold Rush,” the term coined by author and veteran urchin diver Tom Kendrick for the boom of the California sea urchin trade between the ’70s and ’90s, when fleets of thrill-seeking misfits descended upon this hot spiny cash crop like aquatic forty-niners.

 California’s first generation of sea urchin harvesters were modern pirates, laying out charts, facing down sharks, pilfering abalone, smuggling contraband, slugging tequila, and jumping from ships with abandon. “Even the most upstanding, law-abiding urchin divers,” Kendrick writes his memoir, “lurk on the fringes of lunacy.” 

There’s a story of a homicidal ship captain who, to prevent sea otters from eating his urchins, would blast them with a short-barreled shotgun. “It was a game!” Kendrick writes.
“A dangerous, exciting, lucrative game.”

At the peak of the market, in December 1990, “highliners” (top urchin divers) were clearing $10,000 a week—worth $23,000 today, or well over $1M per year. “We had sacks of money, we had bags of money, we had barrels of money,” writes Kendrick. 

The divers spent their cash on houses, sports cars, extravagant parties, rumored stashes of illicit drugs. One processor bought himself a vacation to Egypt and managed to smuggle home a black-market mummy, which he unveiled as a surprise at his welcome-back party, prompting his guests to throw up.

By the mid-’90s, the market had bottomed out. The California urchin trade, tied to the yen, tanked due to the Japanese recession, and was hurt further by increased competition from growing markets in Chile, Mexico, and Canada.

It was around this time that Boobala bought a house in Ojai for his family. Rhoads was a toddler. The crash forced Boobala into foreclosure, then to divorce, then to the bottle, which he still hasn’t put down, living and drinking alone on a ramshackle boat in the harbor where his son docks his own.

This was a topic that, out of evident respect for both Rhoads and Boobala, was met with reticence by nearly everyone I interviewed—before, unprompted, they inevitably elaborated in great detail. It was as though the significance of the life that Rhoads had built—a jack-of-all-trades waterman, a homeowner, and a devoted soon-to-be family man, all by 30—was impossible to fully appreciate without knowing what he’s had to overcome.

“You have to understand, Boobala wasn’t a mean drunk,” says Eric “E-Ride” Rogers, Boobala’s old colleague and Rhoads’ boat-building mentor. “He was the nicest, most generous guy you could know. But he was irresponsible. He’d go on benders and give all his money away to strangers. He’d invite bums to sleep on his couch when he had kids at home.”

“My mom hated me because I looked just like him,” says Rhoads, who indeed shares his father’s lanky frame, bright-blue eyes, and outrageously thick blond hair. 

In high school, Rhoads’ 18-months-older sister, Chelsea Moanilehua Rhoads, lived with their mother, Diane, while Rhoads lived with Boobala, where often the child played father to the man. To help his father save money, Rhoads insisted on confiscating Boobala’s sea cucumber cash for an entire summer. That September, he handed Boobala $15,000.

Even while living separately, Rhoads’ sister remained fiercely protective of her “baby brother.” Chelsea was the person in whom Rhoads could confide, who’d drive him to surf and make him potfulls of mac and cheese. “I just wanted him to be happy,” she says. “He’s obviously a tough guy, but he was also very sensitive. Even as a little boy, he’d talk about how he couldn’t wait to become a father.”

“When I built my boat, I told her I was naming it after her,” Rhoads says of Chelsea in turn. “And I let her pick the paint color,” which explains the robin’s-egg blue for a guy who mostly wears camo and black.

“Conner kind of lived a fucked-up deal,” says Uncle Eyeball. “Pardon my language, but that’s the only way I can put it to make sense. And for him to have come out like he did, that doesn’t happen to a lot of people. He put his energy into the water, and adventure. He was going to attack it any way he could. That kept him on the straight and narrow.”

Aside from some blurry Isla Vista nights in his early twenties, Rhoads barely drinks. If he nurses an addiction, other than slaying big fish and big waves, it’s to work, an ethic he says he gained, perhaps ironically, from his father. “If you don’t have a job, make one,” Boobala would tell a young Rhoads. 

A natural mechanic, Rhoads began sanding boats at 6 years old, was fully tendering on urchin dives at 14, and at 16 built his first boat. He was captaining vessels before he could afford a license. At 18, he was running 100-foot crew boats responding to oil spills. At 21, he got his coveted urchin permit and became a full-time urchin diver, among the youngest active in the trade. At 30, he still is.

Along the way, Rhoads fashioned himself into an ace spear fisherman, with a jar on his bedside table full of hundreds of ear stones from white sea bass—a fish known as “the gray ghost” for its fabled evasiveness—to prove it. Remaining calm while deep underwater for long periods turned out to be the perfect transferable skill to riding large waves, a pursuit that reached its high point for him in 2016 when he went on a bender alongside Rozsa, tracking from Todos to Maverick’s to Jaws to spots he refuses to name, enduring epic thrashings and careening across multistory faces as if flinging himself into external peril in lieu of the threat of interior vice.

*

Today, the average urchin diver is in his mid-sixties, grandfathered in from the era before permits were introduced to prevent overharvesting. Around 200 permits currently circulate, with an eventual target of just 150. For every 10 that are dropped, only one becomes available. 

Rhoads entered the lottery for new permits at 16, the earliest age allowed, and was lucky to wait just five years for his ticket to the ride. It was 2015. The waters were warm with El Niño. It was the first day of his new career, and everything was already dying.

In the ’80s and early ’90s, Boobala could pick up to 10,000 pounds of urchins per day. Now, a good trip for his son might yield 1,000 pounds. The California sea urchin fishery is currently experiencing its lowest catch totals in history. Uni quality is reportedly on the decline. The reasons are multifactorial and complexly intertwined, but the main culprits appear to be kelp forest loss due to rising sea temperatures and overgrazing by predatory purple urchins (not valued due to their meager uni), historic overharvesting of the coveted red urchins by divers, and, conversely, harvesting restrictions put in place by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in an effort to preserve the red urchin population. 

At anywhere from $1.50 to $6 per pound, today’s smaller hauls can still fetch a nice purse, but that’s before factoring in 15 percent for the processor, plus the costs of gas and oxygen and time spent on maintenance, which is basically an around-the-clock job. Nor can you dive every day. To limit overharvesting, it’s illegal to dive on weekends from June through October, and in winter, heavy storms can make boating a suicide mission. 

There’s also the great toll diving exacts on the body. Repeated exposure to intense pressure changes increases risks of neurological damage, pulmonary issues, bone tissue death, and chronic inner ear damage. As Rhoads likes to say, “Make friends with pain, and you’ll never be lonely.” 

After being yanked to the surface by the boat and his hose, Rhoads recuperated for just one week before returning to dive. He made a near-full recovery. “I definitely had some PTSD,” he admits with striking nonchalance.

In the last 10 years, he’s harvested upward of a million pounds of urchins and built boats that dot the whole harbor. The son he and Bella have on the way will be named Ripley Cruz after the island where the child’s parents were engaged and the place where his father nearly died.

Determined to give his family the security he’s never had, Rhoads just made the sacrifice of accepting a full-time job with the Channel Islands Harbor Patrol—not an easy position to get, but a compromise nonetheless, one that allows him still to dive for urchins on the side, as long as his body permits. “I need that stability for my kid’s future,” he says. “I don’t want him to grow up the way I did.”

Why not just retire from diving altogether, considering the family that needs him, the high risks to both body and mind, and diminishing financial returns? 

I ask Rhoads this as we rock in a swell on the deck of Moanilehua, on a shimmering bluebird day. He releases the hoist and sends a net full of urchins tumbling into the hold.

“Why work a job to make money to catch fish from someone else when I can have the fun of catching it myself?” he asks back. “You can’t take money to the grave, but you can take experiences. Those go with you. And look at this place.” 

He gestures around to the near-absurd beauty of this water, these islands.

It was a foolish question, like asking an urchin why it munches on kelp. This is who Rhoads is: an emissary to old Strand, a descendant of the corelords of yore, student of Eyeball, son of Boobala, pulling up urchins, charging big waves while keeping a grip on the wheel, as if chasing the ghost of his father’s legacy so that he might remake it. He’ll take his chances in these underwater wilds he hopes to one day share with his son, this place made even more precious by the fact that it could disappear.