Claw to the top

As the Sundiver slips out of Long Beach under a waning full moon, Jerry Pancake, 50, shares lobster-snatching secrets: cover lots of bottom, strike quickly and visit Ralphs if you get skunked.

“I’m a hunter at heart,” says the diver from Manhattan Beach. “Once you’re in the water, you’re focused, pushing away the excitement of the boat, you see motion and you go for it. It’s instinctual and primal.”

The boat drops anchor on the mainland side of Catalina Island before midnight Saturday, zero-hour for the most anticipated dive event of the year: lobster blitz 2004. Pancake checks his gear, steps over the side into black water and kicks toward bottom. As his eyes adjust to the dim underworld, he spots movement below.

For about 3,000 California divers, the lobster opener blends the thrill of chase with one of the ocean’s delicacies. Red crustaceans skitter on the bottom, fleeting targets that may soon be butterflied, steamed, skewered or rolled inside an enchilada or ravioli.

California’s recreational divers have the ocean to themselves until the commercial lobster season opens Wednesday. It’s their chance to grab as many “bugs” as they can by hand, but no more than seven per day. Anglers can catch lobsters by tossing a baited hoop net overboard.

“It’s a celebration lobster night,” says Akio Suzuki, who brought nine students from his Cal Diving school in Gardena. “Just one night a year is not enough.”

Legal size lobsters measure at least 3 1/4 inches from the eye socket to the beginning of the tail. The state Department of Fish and Game says violators face fines of up to $1,000 and six months in jail. The recreational lobster season ends mid-March.

On Sunday, many divers ended up at the Dive N’ Surf shop, a Redondo Beach way station and sponsor of the 28-year-old Lobster Mobster contest, to swap stories and photos and pick up free T-shirts. Lobsters average 3 pounds, says Linda Sue Dingle, scuba director at the shop, though a 9-pound brute came in over the weekend.

Few beefy lobsters remain off the Southern California coast because for decades fishermen pulled them from the sea faster than nature replenished them. A lobster takes nearly six years to reach sexual maturity and lives up to 30 years. The state record is a 26-pound, 3-foot-long bug, according to the Fish and Game department.

Lobsters spend days hiding in crevices from predators. They emerge at night to feed on algae, small fish, mussels and clams. Catching them requires patience, speed and control over panic. The ocean at night is a dark alley, a blacked-out elevator, an expanse of mind tricks where terror can engulf like cold current. In moonlit water, the heart races and throbs in the ears as swimming things brush past. Eyes dart and divers stop and pivot, imagining bad things nearby.

A veteran diver, Pancake glides stealthily down 40 feet toward the bottom. He scours the sandy floor with a flashlight and spots a lobster near a kelp patch.

Pancake closes, but the lobster senses danger and scoots from the light. The diver shines the beam to block the animal’s escape and edges closer and closer. In a flash, Pancake darts his gloved hand, pins the squirming lobster on the bottom and stuffs it into a sack.

No trips to the supermarket this year.