It really was quite interesting, though. Most people found the underwater scenery incredibly novel, not to mention the unusual things they could find there.
Even occasionally picking up something valuable could be a wonderful surprise.
Hardly anyone had explored the underwater world yet, and even fishing boats were scarce, so the surprises often came one after another.
Ye Yaodong searched around the submerged reefs, picking up whatever he could find, but still failed to locate yesterday's crevice.
He thought the bigfin reef squid might be gone. Perhaps they had left overnight and returned to fifty meters below the surface. Otherwise, with only this stretch to search, he would not have gone so long without finding them.
Luckily, he had been gathering things as he searched, and his mesh bag was full now. Just as he was about to head up, he happened to find another sea cucumber crawling along the bottom.
It felt springy in his hand and quite thick. He stuffed it straight into his mesh bag, then surfaced and swam toward the fishing boat.
"Any luck?" Father Ye asked, giving him a hand up.
"I couldn't find the soft cuttlefish. They probably swam away, or I wouldn't have spent so long looking without finding them. But I found another patch of pen shells down there. There looked to be even more than last year, whole stretches of them sticking up from the seabed."
As he spoke, he untied the mesh bag from his waist and emptied it into a bucket.
Everything tumbled out with a clatter.
"You picked up quite a few abalone, and a sea cucumber too. These pen shells are pretty big. They must be thirty centimeters long..."
Father Ye picked through them, hefting one and then another before putting them back.
"I kept an eye