By Michael Matza

OFF STONINGTON, Maine _ The high-pressure hose explodes with a "pow," jetting compressed air from the scuba tank's regulator. Mark Hoster roars a profanity, his cumbersome diving fins. 3-pound ankle weights, 40-pound lead belt and dry suit hampering his rush to replace the split hose. Hoster has been at sea since dawn, bagging spiny creatures in 24 feet of 32-degree saltwater with the joy of a man raking up $5 bills.

Stopping to replace the black rubber hose amid radioed gale warnings on the cluttered deck of the red-hulled Sea Harvester in 5-degree weather is a development Hoster relishes about as much as a prospector enjoys repacking a mule. Aflame with money lust, Hoster hates the delay. Before Japanese demand created a market for urchin roe, you couldn't give away the prickly, reddish-green pincushions best known for fouling lobster traps.

Now, five years into a boom of gold rush proportions, the urchin haul in Maine surpasses even lobster tonnage, and divers, brokers and conservationists talk of having to rescue a resource that could fall as fast as it has risen. From catches that failed to earn $50,000 in 1986, the U.S. urchin take in 1993 topped 41 million pounds and $26 million. Earning a dollar and sometimes much more per pound, individual divers rake in up to $50,000 a year. With many ocean species

  With many ocean species already near extinction, the Maine urchin fishery is in danger of being picked clean. Only about 800 licensed divers applied for urchin permits when the state first began requiring them in 1992. Now more than 2,000 have permits.

Plentiful, but precious

"Other fisheries seemed limitless at some point in their histories," Joe Mokry, a marine biologist and diver from Portland, said recently. "But the writing's on the wall. If we don't regulate the number of urchins taken, we'll all be out of a job pretty soon." In Stonington, the rustic tip of Maine's remote Deer Isle, where predawn breakfasts served on knotty-pine diner tables end with cries of "Go get 'em," urchining is wintertime salvation for idled fishers.

Most of the year, Rick Bubar, 39, skipper of the Sea Harvester, is a gill-netter, landing cod, pollock, hake and other species. But federal efforts to protect North Atlantic finfish have closed many New England fishing grounds, including the historically rich Georges Bank. So in 1990 Bubar began urchining, and last year he learned to dive.

Bubar's crew is a hardworking corps: son Richard, 20; expert diver Mike Parks, 26; the harried Hoster, 38, and Dan Bray, 19. Wearing a dry suit (an insulated inflatable jumpsuit to protect against hypothermia) Richard pilots a 14-foot skiff, ferrying baskets of urchins from the divers to the Sea Harvester. Bray cleans the catch of seaweed and other detritus and packs it, 60 pounds to a load, into blue and green plastic boxes called totes.

"Looks like it's going to breeze up," remarks Parks, gazing off to the ragged horizon as Sea Harvester rides at anchor near an undersea ledge. Overhead, eider and old squaw ducks flap frantically. Except for the Camden Hills in the distance, and a small dark dragger plying nearby shoals, nothing is in sight. The whiskered head of an old gray seal breaks the surface as Richard, cigarette dangling from his lips, guns the outboard, then throttles back abruptly to snag a blue nylon dive line streaming from an orange buoy. The divers scoop or rake the urchins off the bottom and put them in a net bag, and the tender hauls in the catch.

"These . . . urchins are pretty much gold," he declares, hauling hand over hand to bring a brimming bagful of urchins to the surface. "I love it."

They love it, too, at Tokyo's huge Tsukiji market, where buyers pay top yen to satisfy their country's appetite for the delicacy they call uni. Depending on the season, top-quality roe, a gold-orange hue the Japanese regard as a celebration color, can sell for more than $350 a pound. The roe, which grow inside the urchins in five velvety tongues, are extracted by hand at shoreside processing plants and packed into 100-gram containers.

Standing on damp concrete floors inside refrigerated warehouses, urchin pickers, mostly Asian immigrants in Portland and New York, grade the roe according to color and texture. Poor quality ends up in a fish paste used for flavoring. Prime quality is shipped by air to Japan. Fortunately for Mainers, the peak of the state's urchin harvest comes in early winter, when urchins are in great demand for Japanese holiday banquets. Urchins found in Japanese, Korean and Chinese waters are spawning then and not marketable. But business is highly sensitive: The death of Emperor Hirohito and the recent earthquake in Kobe sent the price for Maine urchins plummeting.

There's a downside to the timing. Winter, when divers must pick days that are just above freezing so the urchins don't freeze solid in the Maine air, presents its own dangers to the already hazardous occupation of divers. For muscular, 5-foot-ll, 205-pound Parks, who goes through a new $1,500 dry suit every year, commercial diving is a labor of love. Given its dangers and demands, it has to be.

"You gotta love it or you couldn't stand it," says Parks, stripping off thick, single-fingered black mitts, and peeling back a skintight hood to change air tanks as a freshening wind makes the cold bite down harder.

—The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 8, 1995