Point Loma Tide Pools

This guide to the Point Loma Tide Pools in San Diego opens with a rule that would have baffled the people who once relied on this shoreline: Kumeyaay families who read the tides as a calendar, and the Chinese immigrant fishermen who later built a village at La Playa and turned these reefs into a working larder. It follows the abalone trade they built here, pulled off the rocks by the boatload, salted and dried for shipment along the coast, until the reef could no longer keep up with demand. You'll hear how a fishery that once seemed limitless quietly gave out. Look for what still moves in the low zone once the tide pulls back.