RANDY FRY'S LUNGS BEGAN TO BURN as he swam along the ocean floor on a fading breath, 15 feet below the Pacific's murky surface. The water was frigid and dark, and Fry was making one of his first freedives in nearly a year. As carbon dioxide built up in his bloodstream, the 50-year-old Californian craned his neck toward the sunlight and kicked hard. When he finally broke the surface, he took a huge gulp of air and basked in the glorious afternoon.

Fry and his friend Cliff Zimmerman, 58, had dropped anchor in the cove at Kibesillah Rock, a Godzilla-size offshore sea stack ten miles north of Fort Bragg, California. The two men, diving buddies for 30 years, had chosen Kibesillah because the waters around it teem with a rare, much coveted delicacy: a saltwater mollusk called Haliotis rufescens, commonly known as red abalone.

So far they hadn't found any of the huge "abs" that Zimmerman had promised—a trophy specimen, shaped like an oblong plate, measures ten inches across—and Fry was getting antsy. As the two men bobbed in their wetsuits, three feet apart, Zimmerman turned to him and said, "The big ones are right below me."

Fry smiled, bent at the waist, and disappeared into the olive-green water.

Seconds later, Zimmerman watched in horror as the green churned red. He felt the buoyant push of something enormous; then, only a foot away, the dorsal fin of an 18-foot-long, 4,000-pound-plus great white bulged to the surface.

Zimmerman swam as fast as he could to his 30-foot boat and radioed for help. Within minutes, three helicopters and three boats had arrived to start a search, but they didn't find Fry's decapitated body until the next day, August 16, 2004. His head washed up a full two and a half weeks later, two miles away.

Though Zimmerman had watched Fry plunge into oblivion, he still dives for abs, and he'll tell you without hesitation that his friend "died doing the thing he loved best."

Which is a little strange, considering that Randy Fry died hunting snails.