LA JOLLALA JOLLA — After more than a year of planning and nearly a century of history, a new plaque in La Jolla’s Scripps Park honors the Bottom Scratchers diving club.
The Bottom Scratchers, considered one of the earliest free-diving associations in the United States, formed in San Diego in the 1930s with a focus on catching local seafood to feed ’ families. The participants didn’t use snorkels or fins but instead held their breath while diving deep into the ocean, often off La Jolla.
The new plaque, unveiled the evening of May 10, is embedded in a boulder next to a bench near a grove of trees overlooking Point La Jolla. The plaque was donated by San Diego Freedivers, and installation was handled by the San Diego Parks & Recreation Department.
“Almost 100 years ago … in the middle of the Depression, people were starving and La Jolla was a blue-collar neighborhood,” said Volker Hoene, a San Diego Freedivers member who helped shepherd the project. “A bunch of guys decided to go into the water and get fish [to feed people], so they made little goggles, but no wetsuit, no speargun, no spear, no fins. They got in the water and thought ‘Look at all this stuff!’ So they formed this club called the Bottom Scratchers.”
To become a member, Hoene said, “you had to dive down to 30 feet and get three abalone on one breath … and get a 3-foot lobster in 20 feet of water … and then catch a shark by its tail and bring it in.”
Bottom Scratchers have been credited with inventing or improving diving and spearfishing technology, initiating creation of the La Jolla ecological reserve, pioneering underwater photography and forming the first San Diego Port District dive team. They also helped scientists conduct research dives.
“Bottom Scratchers said we needed to restrict the take on [certain fish], leading to limits on the take of black sea bass, abalone and lobster,” Hoene said. “They did a lot for conservation.”
The group had only 19 , all of whom are deceased.
Previously, the only commemoration of the group consisted of rocks known as “tombstones” at the bottom of the sea off Point La Jolla. When a Bottom Scratchers member would die, another member or a friend would carve the person’s name into a rock and free-dive to place the stone on the seafloor. Volunteers occasionally dive to clean the stones.
The new plaque is intended to honor the Bottom Scratchers and note the tombstones at sea.
They are out there,” Hoene said. “You can see this is a sacred place. … The Bottom Scratchers dedicated every dive to preventing the waste of sea life and helping others appreciate the wonders of the sea … and ask others to do the same.”
Last year, the La Jolla Parks & Beaches board gave its to the then-proposed plaque and boulder. At the time, shared stories of what the Bottom Scratchers meant to them.
Mackin-Solomon writes for the U-T Community Press.
