WHILE THE HUNGER for abalone can lead to crime and death, a more common outcome—as I saw during opening weekend last April—is unbridled stupidity. Scores of ab divers were waddling into massive seas near the Sonoma County town of Ocean Cove, many not seeming to care about that day's 14-foot swell.

"We get plenty of knuckleheads out here," said Kirby Booth, 48, one of 15 binocular-toting search-and-rescue volunteers who joined a dozen other state and county officials to keep watch as the season got started.

"These divers give up mowing lawns for the weekend, drive 150 miles to the coast, and by God they're going ab diving, come hell or high water," he said.

Some years are worse than others. Old-timers still talk about opening weekend of the 1994 season, which saw 20-foot waves and ten rescues before noon. During the 1995 opener, Roger Rude, a 52-year-old retired lieutenant with the Sonoma County sheriff's search-and-rescue team, watched two men walk right by him and straight into the ocean while he unsuccessfully gave CPR to a young man who'd just drowned.

The 2005 opener was relatively quiet, despite the heavy conditions, but the sheriff's team kept itself busy buzzing the coast, 200 feet up, in Henry 1, its $2.5 million Bell 407 helicopter. As we whirred over yet another wave of people heading out to sea, 36-year-old pilot Paul Bradley explained the drill.

Usually a rescue entails clipping a deputy—known as a "meatball" or "screaming teabag"—to the belly of the bird, dragging him through the air on a line at 60 miles per hour, and plopping him into heaving, 15-foot-seas to pull out a struggling diver. "Most of the time," said Bradley, "the divers are either too far out past the break to get back in, or they're already dead."

With Bradley and the crew flying overhead, I went to Stillwater Cove—a favorite ab spot north of Ocean Cove. I watched as a trio of tattooed oil-refinery contractors from the Bay Area joked, "We're fishing for shark, and we're the bait!" Nearby, a candy maker from San Carlos watched a wave explode against a rock, looked at his buddy, and sighed, "Well, we're going to get beat up." They went in anyway.