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When the seaweed divers of Guafo Island return to the surface, it’s as if they’ve come back from some distant planet. Three men heave their slippery bodies onto a fishing vessel, like dazed aquanauts, dressed from boot to hood in thick black wetsuits to endure the chill of maritime Patagonia. It’s only lunchtime, but these tired men have been underwater so long already that their faces are shriveled like prunes.
“It’s a tough life out here,” says the captain of the Cobra vessel, Manuel Vidal, who, at 57, has spent the past four decades working off the coast of this remote Chilean island. He comes to sustainably harvest a flat, leathery, maroon-colored seaweed called luga. The luga season begins each year in October and ends in March. During that time, dozens of boats like Cobra take men eight hours away from the port of Quellón for multi-week shifts out at sea.
All morning, these divers have been connected to 450-foot oxygen hoses, plying the ocean floor 30 feet below. They’ve gathered seaweed into nets and surfaced – only briefly every half-hour or so – to deliver the 150-pound loads to Vidal before descending once again into the murky Eastern South Pacific. Most of this luga will eventually make its way into either the cosmetics industry or carrageenan (a thickening agent for the food industry).
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