Having filled two of his three totes with smallish urchins from the upper levels of the slope, he'd sent their floatlines to the surface, left them for Dex to recover, and then descended below the eelgrass canopy. The going proved rough much of the way down. As he had noticed leaving the harbor channel, the changeable winds had produced fairly strong turbidity currents, forcing him to waste a lot of energy fighting the drag, and stirring up so much sand and detritus that he'd been unable to see further than five or six feet in any direction at some points during the dive. Although conditions improved once he neared the floor of the cove and began to go with the drift, his outer field of vision had remained limited to about a dozen yards, making him wonder if he'd have to cut his dive short without bagging any first-rate specimens.

Then the recess had revealed itself to him through pure chance. Hidden from above by a wide ledge of rock, its entrance sheeted over with eelgrass, it would have gone unnoticed had the current not disturbed the fronds just as he'd been swimming past.

He glided closer to investigate, sweeping the area with his flashlight, using his free hand to part the long, serpentine strands of kelp ribboning up to the surface. Schools of silvery herring and other tiny fish Ricci couldn't name bulleted in and out of the light as he shone it into the opening.

The penetrating high-intensity beam revealed the hollow to be quite small, cutting no more than twelve or fifteen feet into the slope of the ridge, its entrance barely wide enough to admit Ricci in his scuba outfit and tank--a tight squeeze. Still, he felt a surge of excitement over his find. The interior of the cavity was filled with mature, whoppingly big urchins. Urchins galore, clinging three and four deep to every vertical and horizontal surface. The incredible concentration would allow him to stuff his goodie bag to the top just by gathering those nearest the entrance, leaving the rest of the spiny creatures to do whatever they did when they weren't intruded upon by foraging predators, human or otherwise.

He reached down to his thigh and pulled his urchining knife from its scabbard.

Before getting started, Ricci checked his watch and gauge console, then did some quick mental computations based on the scuba instruction he'd received in the Navy. Though his psi dial showed an ample reserve of air, he was already edging beyond a no-decompression profile and would need to make a decompression stop on ascent. Not atypical for him, but very definitely something to remember.