Action : The Bottom Scratchers

SAN DIEGO —  When the Bottom Scratchers were young, they found a profusion of life in the coastal waters of Southern California such as would never exist again.

The members of the oldest and most exclusive skin-diving club in the world saw lobsters, abalone and sea bass in numbers almost too great to count. Before air tanks and wet suits were even conceived, they speared sharks and floated through kelp forests.

But time has changed all that, and it has changed the Scratchers, too. Club president Wally Potts--the man whose club nickname is One Long Dive, the one who bagged a then world-record 401.5-pound sea bass off the Coronado Islands in 1954 without using air tanks--recently vowed never to go skin diving again.

It is no average vow. Along with his fellow Bottom Scratchers, Potts helped introduce the sport of skin diving to the world. The club’s members are also renowned for inventing and improving diving equipment.

Charter member Jack Prodanovich made the first set of diving goggles, the first face mask and the first underwater camera. He and Potts were among the first to build their own spear guns and later sold their designs to major manufacturers. When rubber swim fins came on the market around 1940, the Bottom Scratchers were quick to use and popularize them.

Now, Potts claims he is hanging up his swim fins for good. “I still look OK and get around OK,” said Potts, a massive, barrel-chested man of 68, “but I’m pretty well stiffened up.” Climbing out of the water onto a bobbing boat has become difficult for him, and 1981 was the last year he attempted diving at Sunset Cliffs, near his Point Loma home.

“It wasn’t so much a problem getting into the water (at the base of the cliffs), but getting out was definitely a problem,” he said. “With the swells down there, I was getting kind of beat up on the rocks.”

As for other potential diving locations along San Diego County’s coast, Potts just shakes his head. Sewage spills, overfishing and crowds have led the Bottom Scratchers to forgo most of them for years.

Potts’ vow to end his diving career comes at a time when the club is starting to show signs of age. Only 19 men were ever admitted; only nine are alive today, and only five remain in San Diego: Potts, Prodanovich, Bill Johnston, Jim Stewart and Ben Stone.

Prodanovich, Stewart and Johnston still dive regularly, and as recently as last year, club members met every month at Potts’ house, swapping stories over beer and cioppino or smoked fish. But then members Bob Rood and Lamar Boren died, and Beau Smith moved to a small town near Port Angeles, Wash. Stewart rarely made it to the meetings because of his work schedule as diving officer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Johnston, who owns a pair of diving charter boats, found it almost impossible to attend during certain months when his business was booming.

“It got kind of discouraging,” said Potts, “so we stopped the meetings. We still get together roughly every month or so, though. We do it over lunch. It’s more convenient.”

When the Bottom Scratchers are gone, skin diving will continue, but it won’t be the same.

Jack (The Walrus) Prodanovich

Prodanovich moved to San Diego with his family in 1916, when he was 3 years old. He graduated from Point Loma High School and was 20 years old when he, Ben Stone and Glenn Orr founded the Bottom Scratchers in 1933. “We were getting together at each others’ houses all the time for seafood dinners, so we decided we should just start a club,” Prodanovich recalled.

The three men liked to wear the horn of a horn shark tied to the key pocket of their swimsuits, and when they dove, the horn would sometimes leave a scratch mark on the sandy ocean bottom. From that the club’s name was aptly coined.

Prodanovich was an innovator and a tinkerer from the start. In 1933, he crafted the first pair of diving goggles by removing two mirrors from womens’ compacts, scraping the paint off the backs of them, and fitting them into short lengths of automobile radiator hose. Soon after that he improved on the concept by making a metal face mask--also the world’s first.

As the club members increased their diving skills, Prodanovich kept trying to expand and improve their equipment. In 1938, he built the first underwater camera, an old Brownie box camera encased in sheet copper. He had to surface and unscrew a tire valve cap to advance the film after each shot, and the pictures weren’t exactly crystal clear; but the camera worked.

Prodanovich also built and patented a power head (a pole spear with a .38-caliber cartridge firing mechanism) that allowed divers to go after truly giant fish for the first time in the mid-1940s. Potts used the power head to kill a 401.5-pound black sea bass off the Coronado Islands in 1954, the largest fish ever caught by a skin diver at that time.

For 35 years (he retired in 1972), Prodanovich worked nights as a high school custodian, which left him free to dive in the mornings. He and the other club members took paddle boards out to the kelp beds off San Diego every chance they got. “However cold the water was in the last 48 years, we were in it,” Prodanovich said matter-of-factly. “Most of us got to where we could free dive to 40 feet, and stay underwater for close to three minutes--and that was before swim fins.”

Every diver has had a few close calls. For Prodanovich, one of those times came only a few years ago in Baja California. A fellow diver speared a 760-pound maru (a type of sea bass) about 300 yards off the beach, and Prodanovich swam down to help bring the big fish in. Unfortunately, the maru hugged the bottom and wouldn’t budge.

“I started up for the surface, and all of a sudden that fish looked up at me and raised his spines,” said Prodanovich, still incredulous. “The next thing I knew, he hit me right in the stomach.

“Did you ever play football? Ever been blind-sided? That fish knocked my face plate off and knocked the wind out of me.

“We did get him, though.”

Although he still sees the other club members in San Diego regularly, Prodanovich said he misses the monthly meetings. “You got a chance to say ‘hi’ to the guys, and each one always had something interesting to talk about.

“We always tried to keep the club small, so it wouldn’t get out of control and turn into just a social club,” he went on. “That’s one of the differences between the Bottom Scratchers and most other diving clubs--that and the fact that we were the oldest and most experienced (skin divers) in the world.”

Currently, Prodanovich builds custom spear guns for other divers. At 73, he still has the rangy, muscular body of a man 30 years his junior, but a dive he made in 1983 has left him partially deaf. Doctors have advised him against further diving, but Prodanovich, complaining that medical treatments haven’t improved his hearing, went diving at Cabo San Lucas in Baja California last month. “I’ll gave the ear the old saltwater treatment,” he said.

Bill (Sand Dollar) Johnston

Johnston graduated from Hoover High School in 1938 and began skin diving at La Jolla in 1939. But it wasn’t until he got out of the Navy, after World War II, that he ran into Prodanovich and Potts. “We dove at La Jolla and all along Sunset Cliffs,” recalled Johnston, 67. “Then I got a 36-foot boat, the VID, which stood for Very Important Diver. After that we started going to the Coronado Islands, because that’s where the world-record sea bass were.”

For a time, Johnston worked as a fisherman on a tuna boat, spending 300 days a year at sea. But in 1954 he co-founded San Diego Divers Supply, a retail shop that catered to local divers. He became a member of the Bottom Scratchers in 1964, and in 1968 launched a 63-foot diving charter boat, the Bottom Scratcher. All 19 of the club members’ names are inscribed on the ship’s bell.

Johnston still remembers how he was inducted into the club. First he was “blindfolded” with a face mask whose plate had been covered with cardboard, and then he was told to put his hand in a tub of water. Grasping what he immediately realized was an undersized, illegal lobster, he took off the mask, only to find himself being ticketed by a game warden who happened to be present.

But the ceremony had a grimmer meaning, too. Previously, prospective members had been required to make a single dive to a depth of 30 feet--without the aid of swim fins--and bring up three abalone. By the time Johnston was inducted, though, overfishing had made abalone so scarce that a diver would have drowned before being able to find three on a single visit to the bottom. “The ocean environment just kept degrading to the point where, if we had kept the same ceremony, no one would have been able to join the club,” said Potts.

The conservation-minded Bottom Scratchers blame overzealous scuba divers and commercial fishermen for the decline in local fish and shellfish. All the club’s members have used scuba gear, but they feel it is inappropriate to use the gear for taking shallow-water species such as abalone. “The poor old abalone, he doesn’t run very fast,” said Potts. “When you’re skin diving, you couldn’t take them all if you wanted to, but a scuba diver can go down and clean a place out.”

Prodanovich complained that fishermen with gill nets have all but wiped out fish such as sea bass and halibut, which were once numerous along the coast. “It’s skinny pickin’ here now, and it’s the same story down in Baja. People are taking everything in the ocean faster than it’s growing, and pretty soon it’s just going to be gone.”

Club members have supported legislation that would have limited scuba diving near shore, and they also lobbied--more successfully--for the establishment of the San Diego-La Jolla Underwater Park.

Johnston, who sold his interest in San Diego Divers Supply in 1969 in order to devote full time to his diving charter business, uses scuba tanks more readily than some of his fellow Bottom Scratchers, and hasn’t lost his taste for diving. He had an appendectomy in early October, but less than two weeks later he was back out on one of his diving boats. “Now I wish the scar would heal up so I could diving again,” he complained. “I like to get in the water at least once a day. It’s just so damn much fun trying to outthink those lobsters.

“I see the other guys in the club once a month or less,” he added, “but I’m on the phone to them constantly when I’m in port, so we haven’t lost too much” of the closeness the Bottom Scratchers once shared.

Jim (Sheepshead) Stewart

Stewart still bears deep scars on his right arm from a shark that attacked him while he was diving off Wake Island 25 years ago. The gruff 59-year-old, who is the diving officer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sometimes lets his students see the scars to remind them that they must be adaptable and think quickly to survive in the ocean.

As diving officer, Stewart’s duties include testing diving equipment and supervising a 100-hour class for Scripps researchers who want to learn how to dive. “But I still prefer skin diving to putting a tank on my back,” he noted. On his lunch hour, he often takes a boogie board out into the water near his Scripps office and spearfishes for halibut.

Stewart began skin diving in 1942, when he was a student at National City Junior High School. But, like Johnston, he didn’t meet members of the Bottom Scratchers until after World War II when he was discharged from the Army Air Corps. “In ‘51, they asked me to join the club. We were a pretty diverse group, but we all came together to get wet,” he said.

Stewart earned a bachelor’s degree in botany from Pomona College and has dived at some of the most exotic diving areas in the world, including the South Pacific and the Antarctic. His work schedule at Scripps often prevents him from meeting with the other club members. “We sometimes get together for lunch, but everybody’s doing different things. We’re different people now,” he said, adding that he doesn’t miss the camaraderie among club members because he now shares a similar relationship with the relatively small community of research divers around the nation.

“A lot of the old allegiances are still there, though,” noted Stewart. “The Bottom Scratchers were a one-of-a-kind club because so many of us were involved in the evolution of diving equipment. Before there was any you could buy, we built it.”

Ben (Porpoise) Stone

One of three founding members of the Bottom Scratchers, Stone, 73, was one of the first students to graduate from Point Loma High School. He went on to obtain a college degree in landscaping and still works part time as a self-employed gardener.

One of Stone’s most vivid memories is of the time he encountered a large blue shark off La Jolla. “I was floating in about 30 feet of crystal-clear water, looking down for halibut. All at once the shark came into my vision, hugging the bottom. It was 12 to 18 feet long, and at first I just thought, ‘Whoa!’ My paddle board was 13 feet long, and this shark was bigger.

“He turned and came up at me at a 45-degree angle, and I hit him in the nose with my spear.” The shark swam away but quickly returned, and Stone struck at it again with his spear. “Then a big wave broke on top of us, and all I could see was foam. I headed for the shore and never looked back. I tell you, I couldn’t talk for half an hour.”

Stone said he still dives in shallow water occasionally. He also began writing a book on the Bottom Scratchers a few years ago. It’s a project he may or may not complete, he conceded. “You try to tell people how it was, and they just don’t believe you. When we first started the club, everywhere you looked there was abalone, and we got 20-pound lobsters. We had it all to ourselves. Now you go to La Jolla and you can’t even find a place to park.”

He still sees other members of the Bottom Scratchers from time to time, but Stone said “it seems like everyone’s always got something to do. We don’t seem to have as much time.”

In the old days, “we were just like brothers. The club seemed like something that would last forever, but now some of the guys have died. . . . “

Wally (One Long Dive) Potts

In recent years, Potts, 68, has been the soul of the Bottom Scratchers, and he became president for an indefinite term in 1981. A former student at Point Loma High School, he dropped out in 1935 to work at Solar Aircraft (now Solar Turbines), working nights whenever he could so that he could dive during the day.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Bottom Scratchers dove mostly at San Diego beaches, but Potts remembers one trip he and Prodanovich made with their wives to Aliso Beach, just south of Laguna Beach, in 1941. Only a few fishermen were on the beach, and as Potts and Prodanovich put on their newfangled face masks and swim fins, the fishermen nudged each other and announced loudly that the area was virtually devoid of abalone and fish.

“When we got in the water, we saw big green abalone all over the place, and eels to match,” said Potts. “We just reached down and grabbed enough for dinner. I speared a few fish on the way in, and when those fishermen saw us, well, their attitude was completely different.” By the time Potts and Prodanovich moved on three days later, the fishermen had purchased spears and face masks.

In 50 years of skin diving, Potts has confronted sharks and nearly drowned once. But he remembers his first dive as well as any: “It was like seeing a whole new world. In particular, I recall all the little fish swimming and how clear the water was. Everything impressed me--you see more on that first dive than you ever do afterward.”

Now he has the memory of his last dive to go with the memory of his first. Potts, Prodanovich and a friend were diving beneath “kelp paddies”--patches of free-floating surface kelp--last summer, about 25 miles off the coast of San Diego. “There are no currents to contend with out there, so it’s easy diving, but it’s kind of spooky,” said Potts. “There’s no bottom, and if you want to let sharks play on your mind. . . . I saw blue sharks, but they never bothered me and didn’t act like they would.

“It was still early morning when we found a small kelp paddy, and I went over the side. I saw one fish swimming there beneath the kelp--it was a yellowtail, about 15 pounds--and I signalled to the boat that there was only one fish. I speared it and got back in the boat, and we figured, boy, we’d have a great day since we’d found a fish at the very first spot.”

But the three men dove beneath kelp paddy after kelp paddy for the rest of the day, without any luck. That 15-pound yellowtail may be the last fish that Wally Potts will ever catch.