WILD SEAS
They are all gone. It can’t be. Did I swim into the wrong bay by mistake?
No, of course I didn’t. To my right is the cake-shaped boulder carpeted by purple sea urchins; to my left is the distinctive crack at the base of a rocky pinnacle, home to a curious octopus that loves to explore my fingertips with its tentacles. Just ahead is a cluster of swaying kelp that, with a little bit of imagination, looks like a herd of drunk giraffes. I am definitely in the right place.
I swim away into the swell rolling across the bay. But neither direction nor distance changes the fact that all my study animals – dinner plate-size sea snails, called abalone – have disappeared overnight.
My confusion is soon replaced by despair, then anger, and then unedited rage; I actually scream four-letter expletives. The shock wave of insults cascading through my snorkel causes a nearby school of fish to scatter.
Shaken, I try to piece together what has happened. Swimming a search pattern across the crime scene, I soon find clues left by the perpetrators: a slime-covered bag entangled in the kelp canopy, a rusty screwdriver wedged between two holdfasts, and a cracked flashlight on the seabed. I then find one, then two, then dozens of abalone shells. A wave carries me deep into a gully, and my worst fears are realised. Behind a large
