Like most local fishermen in Kino, a sleepy Sonoran town about halfway down the eastern side of the Sea of Cortez, Ernesto Acuña Salazar had been working small boats off the coast since he was a teenager. A handsome, stocky twenty-four-year-old, Salazar specialized in hookah diving — a practice similar to scuba diving, except that divers breathe through a long tube leading to a compressor at the surface rather than carry a tank on their back.
One day almost four years ago, Salazar put on his gear and entered the water in search of callo de hacha, a long shallow-water…