Historic Sights at Point Lobos

Point Lobos

This is the northwest shore of Whaler's Cove at Point Lobos State Reserve. The word “pristine” is frequently used todescribe the reserve. This image shows the site of a granite quarry, a whale rendering factory, an abalone canning factory, and a US Navy/Coast Guard station. The photograph was taken from a vantage point very near the end of a rail line that carried coal from a mine in the hills above the point to ships waiting in the cove. That is how "Coal Chute Point" got its name. Just to the West was the cluster of homes where Japanese Abalone divers lived. The Japanese had been preceded by a Chinese fishing community, Portuguese Whalers, and others. The granite quarry is pretty obvious if you know what you're looking for. All signs of the other industrial and military uses have been pretty thouroughly removed. The one remaining structure is called the “Whaler's Cabin” but it was actually built by the Quock family from China in the early 1850's.

Pristine?


Prof. Sandy Lydon discusses a recreation of a Rumsien shelter. The dome-shaped frame of branches would be covered with animal skins.	Cabrillo College English Professor Marcy Alancraig evokes an older trandition of language: the oral, telling stories while sitting next to Rumsien grain grinding pits.

An adult Red Abalone, about 8 inches in greatest diameter.

A diver using historic hard hat gear, not too different from that used by Japanese Abalone divers, makes a foray into murky, cold water.

The Rumsien, Quiroste, and other coastal Indian groups ate abalone, and use the shells as tools and decoration. The name "abalone" was suggested by the shape of the shell, it comes from the old Spanish word for "ear"

Russian and English trappers came in the 18th and 19th centuries and turned the Abalone's chief predator into otterskin hats. By the late 1800's Sea Otters were thought to be extinct. The Abalone population probably boomed (nobody knows how many abalone there were before the Sea Otters were hunted). In 1898 Gennosuke Kodani came to Point Lobos and started a business diving for Abalone, and exporting them to Japan, where they were considered a delicacy. Americans at the time generally thought they were disgusting.

Within two years there were cries that foreigners might be "exterminating" a "valuable and delicious" resource. Given the abundant abalone population of that time and Americans' recent attitude about the big mollusks, these statements can only be interpreted as xenophobic or racist. By 1915 the State of California passed laws banning all abalone exports, and Kodani was put out of business.

Almost. "Pop" Ernest Doelter came along and turned Abalone into an American delicacy. The old granite quarry cut in the side of Whaler's Cove, that had held a whale rendering operation in the 1870s, now became home to an Abalone cannery. Japanese divers continued to work into the 1930s, and locals began "rock picking" abalone at low tide. In the years before WWII, people noticed the visible abalone disappearing and pointed fingers, once again, at the Japanese. But abalone don't travel far: the abs the divers were taking were underwater. The disappearance of shore abalone was due to the taking of shore abalone, by locals. Commercial abalone diving continued after the war, and skin and scuba diving became popular, a sport abalone fishery arose.

The (re)discovery of abalone as a food put tremendous pressure on their population. One Japanese diver and his surface support team could land 2000 in a day! As the rocks around Point Lobos were fished out they moved farther south. But divers in that era were restricted by their equipment to shallow water. There was still plenty of breeding stock below their reach. As the sea otters made their return to the region (a small band of survivors was discovered along the isolated Big Sur Coast in 1938 and quickly protected) they resumed their natural diet, and that included abalone. By the 1970s adult abalone at any depth were an infrequent site. But breeding populations still survived, tucked deep in to rocky crevices out of the reach of man and otter alike.

Today a deadly disease threatens to make abalone regionally extinct. Its called "withering syndrome" and its caused by a bacteria. The bacteria have been hampered in the past by the area's typically chilly water. But ocean temperatures around Monterey Bay have been rising slowly and steadily for at least 70 years, and warm pulses in El Nino years help the deadly bacteria further. Abalone farmers have probably added to its spread by unwittingly planting infected young abalone in growth beds to the north. Commercial Abalone fishing has been completely suspended by DFG and sport fishing is under new licensing restrictions. The fate of California's Abalone remains to be seen.


A gull perches atop "Standing Rock" looking seaward, like the wives of the Japanese Abalone divers, waiting for their husbands to return. Coming home half frozen was part of the business. Given the dangers involved, family hoped the divers just came home.	The moon rises through the branches of a Monterey Cypress inside Point Lobos State Reserve.

	Fossilized tracks of an unknown, prehistoric animal. These tracks were probably made deep beneath an ancient ocean and transported to the surface by geologic pocesses.
	An Iris grows on the land that was the front yard of the Kodani family. The Kodai cottages, and the hot tub that rewarmed the hypothermic Abalone divers are gone now, all traces removed when Point Lobos became a State Reserve. But these Irises, that look wild to the uninitiated, are almost certainly descendants of ones transplanted into the Kodani garden plot.