Bay Nature: Bringing Back Kelp

One early summer morning in 2018, Jon Holcomb steered his fishing boat out of Noyo Harbor, just south of Fort Bragg, and headed toward Caspar Point, a jagged promontory along the rocky Mendocino coast. There, he anchored in about 20 feet of water. Yards away, waves roared.

A longtime commercial sea urchin fisherman, Holcomb stayed up top, minding the boat, while his friend and fellow diver, Harry Barnard, submerged himself in the slate-blue water. Under the waves, rock outcroppings covered in spiked purple orbs looked like coronavirus-infected human cells. Other than Barnard and those quarter-size echinoderms, the ocean bottom appeared lifeless. Holcomb and Barnard were there to vacuum up the urchins with a large plastic tube Holcomb had built, called an air lift. In a video taken of the work, Barnard used a long hook to flick urchins off of the rocks and into the mouth of the air lift, where they were sucked into a 350-pound bag.

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