His face and lips went numb in seconds, but that was the least of Wayne Hardy’s worries as he disappeared beneath the ocean’s surface, diving to a bed of sea urchins 14 metres below.
“There are a lot of things that can go wrong,” Hardy said a few days after he and three other divers collectively hauled in roughly 3,000 pounds of sea urchins from the ocean floor off the coast of Main-a-Dieu.
“If things go wrong, there’s not a lot of room for error. There are a lot of bad things that can happen very quickly. So it’s not a matter of going to work and fearing your computer breaks down; you go to work and you could die.”
That’s where Glen McDougall, a boyish 38-year-old skipper, comes in. He’s the guy in charge of the nine-person crew. Guiding his 12-metre vessel along the craggy coastline of Scatarie Island, he’s headed about three kilometres east of Main-a-Dieu, where the best urchins are feeding.
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