Still, the job has its unique appeal, admits the 32-year-old Port Hardy urchin hunter, a dive fisherman for more than 15 years.

"You're your own boss, out on the water in the middle of nowhere. You don't have to conform to anybody's rules of life," he says.

It's good work, honest work, even lucrative, says Hayes, one of 185 scuba divers in a fishery that until recently employed several hundred people up and down the B.C. coast, including dozens of workers at processing plants in Richmond and Vancouver, where the prized roe is prepared for export to Japan.

In 2002, the B.C. urchin fishery was thriving. There were 70 boats in the water working 159 active licences. At the end of the 2002-03 winter harvest, the industry exported $25 million in urchin products, almost exclusively to Japan.

Corey Hayes says he just never saw it coming. Indeed, no one harvesting red and green sea urchins up and down the coast ever imagined that the far-flung activities of the Russian mob would threaten their very livelihoods and stand to drive B.C.'s home-grown urchin industry into extinction.

Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Russia's fishing industry has been largely under the control of the black market. A large share of the trade is in the hands of organized crime and corrupt regional officials, according to EuroFish, a well-respected trade publication.

In 2002, the Russian mob turned its attention to the urchin industry. An illegal and unregulated fishery began in earnest around the Kuril Islands, a Russian-owned archipelago stretching from northern Japan to the southeast coast of Russia.

Russian fishermen then began flooding the Japanese market with cheap, illegal urchin roe.
"It's just huge. They land in a week what we would take in a year," says Hayes. "It's been a downhill ride, that's for sure."

Last year, B.C.'s urchin-product exports plummeted to $16.5 million. This year the export market has all but collapsed. The five-month season has been reduced to a month here, a week there. Boats sit idle, licences go unfished and dive fishermen are fleeing the industry for jobs elsewhere.

"A lot of the guys have gone off to work in construction," says Hayes, who harvests primarily the smaller, green sea urchins.

"I've got five licences. I've fished three quarters of one. I don't know of anyone who'd want to buy or sell a licence these days. Greens licences were going for $100,000, now they're almost worthless. Guys are better off hanging on to them, it can only get better one day."

A Russian report last year found that from 2001 to 2003, 83,000 to 117,000 tonnes of illegally caught seafood -- nearly half of Russia's legal fishing quota -- was unloaded in Japanese fishing ports. Most of this was crab and urchin and was unloaded on the northern island of Hokkaido.

According to a report by the French news agency Agence France-Presse, last May and June alone, 7,000 Russians and 452 Commonwealth of Independent States citizens were arrested for black-market fishing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted last spring that 80 per cent of Russian seafood exports are leaving the country -- untaxed -- through illegal channels.

"We have to modernize this industry -- that is the only way to decriminalize it," he was quoted as saying in EuroFish.
Mike Featherstone, director of B.C.'s Pacific Urchins Harvesters Association, says the Russian fishery has gone to "hell in a hand basket" and B.C.'s urchin industry is in dire straits because of it.

"Nobody likes to use the word mafia, but it's mafia-related, organized crime, and it involves corrupt government officials," says the 52-year-old Whistler resident, who runs his urchin boat, The Forager, out of Port Hardy and Prince Rupert.

"These pirates fish all year long with no regulations or restrictions, then dump it on the market," says Featherstone, adding that as a result, much of B.C.'s seasonal quota will be left in the coastal kelp beds this year.

Featherstone, an urchin harvester since the early 1980s, says Ottawa must step up now if the B.C. urchin industry is to be saved. Canada, he insists, must strongly urge the Japanese to refuse illegal landings and pressure the Russians to clean up their corrupt, illegal and ecologically barbaric fisheries.

Featherstone met with Guy Beaupre, director-general of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, on Dec. 9. Earlier this month he sent an urgent followup letter pressing for immediate action. He has yet to hear back.

The Sunday Province left voice and e-mail messages for Beaupre, asking him what, if anything, Ottawa is prepared to do on behalf of B.C.'s desperate urchin harvesters. There was no reply.

Featherstone has twice been to Japan on fact-finding missions. He says the Japanese are complicit in the illegal seafood dumps.

"They have inspectors, but they're only tasked to inspect vessels carrying legal product," he says. "You can have ships filled with illegal product unloading and the inspectors say, 'Well, I can't inspect that, I only inspect the legal product.'"

DFO fisheries manager Juanita Rogers, based in Prince Rupert, accompanied Featherstone and other industry representatives on the first Japanese fact-finding trip in November 2003.

"The general feeling that we came home with was that it's an organized crime enterprise," says Rogers. "A lot of the Japanese buyers we spoke with didn't want to get involved. It's a little scary, by the sounds of it."

Rogers says the Canadian group met with dozens of Japanese buyers and industry players during eight days of high-level meetings.

"Everyone said if we were going to try and help the B.C. situation at all, we would have to have some higher-level political pressure."

Rogers -- an authority on the urchin industry -- has been "putting some pressure" on Ottawa to step into the fray on behalf of B.C.'s beleaguered urchin harvesters.

"I've written a memo and sent it up through the chain into Ottawa to a higher level of attention," she says. "We're hoping to get some assistance. It's just a constant struggle for these guys."

Mike Featherstone says Japan is now importing nearly 90 per cent of its urchin products from Russia. He says prices for Canadian products have "fallen off the chart" and sales volumes are in "dramatic decline."

Featherstone is hoping to boost existing markets in North America and Europe, where urchin roe is used as a sushi garnish, or in soups and sauces in some French restaurants.

But the hard reality remains: Japan accounts for well over 90 per cent of B.C.'s urchin exports.
Corey Hayes says he's lucky -- he owns his own boat and charter company, and can fall back on fishing tours. He says others aren't so lucky.

"This industry is spiralling downhill and it would definitely help things out if the feds got involved," he says.
"The only plus side: At the rate these Russians are going, they'll wipe out the urchin fishery over there in a matter of years."

mroberts@png.canwest.com
WHAT'S AN URCHIN?
Members of a marine invertebrate group called echinoderms, or "spiny-skinned" animals, sea urchins are found up and down the B.C. coast. Closely related to sea cucumbers and sea stars, these remarkable creatures are encased in a hard shell -- or "test" -- and covered in sharp, defensive spines.

Green sea urchins -- or Greens -- go by the Latin name Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis and live for 10 years or more at maximum depths of 25 metres. Red sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus franciscanus) are much larger than their less florid cousins and can live as long as 200 years.

Urchins may attach themselves tightly to rocks with sucker feet, or choose to crawl across the sea floor using their spines as stilts. They feed on kelp using mouths armed with retractable jaws located on their underside. Their fertilized eggs develop into planktonic larvae that drift in the ocean before settling on the bottom beneath the protective test of an adult urchin.

Greens enter the Canadian fishery at 51/2 centimetres; Reds at 10 cm. Sea urchins, both male and female, are harvested for their sex organs, or roe. Fresh urchin roe -- called "uni" in Japan -- is an excellent source of zinc and Omega-3 fatty acids and considered in some cultures to be a powerful aphrodisiac.

Reds can reach sizes of 20 cm with 10-cm spines. All urchins avoid extreme wave action, sand, mud and uni-loving sea otters.

THE RISE AND FALL OF B.C.'S SEA URCHIN INDUSTRY
- 1950: Large-scale Japanese uni (urchin roe) production begins.
- 1978: B.C.'s South Coast red sea urchin fishery begins in earnest; four boats land 75 tons.
- 1984: B.C.'s North Coast red sea urchin fishery begins.
- 1987: B.C.'s green sea urchin fishery begins on both coasts.
- 1988: 152 divers employed in the urchin industry.
- 1990: 114 commercial urchin vessels operating in B.C. waters; 185 divers land 3,158 tons.
- 1991: Red urchin harvest licence fetches $42,000.
- 1992: 12,983 tons landed on the North Coast alone.
- 1993: DFO first steps in with catch area regulations and timed openings.
- 1994: Industry begins voluntary quota program; Red urchin harvest licence fetches $250,000.
- 1995: DFO introduces government quota program for Greens.
- 1996: DFO introduces quota program for Reds; Red urchin harvest licence fetches $400,000.
- 2002: B.C. exports $25-million in urchin products; 70 boats in the water, 159 active licences; 700 workers industry-wide.

- 2003: In one day, Russian criminals dump B.C.'s entire annual green sea urchin quota (200 tons) on to the market illegally; in just one week, they dump B.C.'s entire annual red sea urchin quota (4,500 tons) on to the market.

- 2004: B.C. urchin exports plummet to $16.5 million.
- 2005: B.C. urchin exports fall to $15 million (forecast); only 30 boats in the water; licences left unfished and can't be sold; divers flee the industry.