This past summer abalone divers brought two large abalone into our office for length record measurement. A new second-rank abalone was recorded in August at the San Diego Department of Fish and Game marine lab. Some divers also told us stories of other divers taking similarly large abalone which were not recorded. We thought this might be a trend of increasing abalone size since we had seen so many large animals recently. Examination of the sport records for abalone length revealed that the top ten were all taken since 1983 and they were all taken from waters north of Fort Bragg. Increasingly larger abalone could be attributable to several factors including decreased competition for food and space due to urchin harvesting, increasing abalone harvesting effort north of Fort Bragg, or increased awareness of the value of abalone stocks and cooperation with Department of Fish and Game record data collection efforts.
Since there seems to be more interest in abalone of large size we publish here the records for the top ten red abalone recorded by the Department of Fish and Game. - WV
THE TOP TEN RED ABALONE
Name inches (mm) Date John Pepper 12.3 313.4 9/93 Bill Bagasarran 11.9 303.4 8/94 Don Thorpe 11.7 298.6 4/84 Otto Humphrey 11.5 293.0 4/84 Doyle Womack 11.3 287.8 4/91 Dan Mowery 11.2 285.2 10/91 Ralph French 11.1 283.8 5/83 Brad Edwards 11.1 283.0 6/87 Martin Hoben 11.0 281.2 8/94 D.J. Miclette 10.9 278.5 11/90