On the Trail of Lobster Tail : It’s Time to Trap Coastal Delicacies

The seas were calm and the morning sky was a postcard blue as Rick Gallagher and his crew set out from Dana Point Harbor earlier this week to get a head start on the long-anticipated lobster season.

Though the six-month season was not to open until today, Gallagher, 37, wanted to get all his traps and bait in place so he could waste no time in catching the spiny delicacy.

“This part really isn’t very exciting,” Gallagher said as he secured a load of lobster traps on a 40-foot boat docked at Dana Wharf Sportfishing. “But Wednesday’s payday!”

Gallagher and his crew of two were among dozens of local fishermen who this week began dotting the Orange County coastline with color-coded buoys that mark the spot where they have set lobster traps.

Although commercial fishermen such as Gallagher won’t check their traps until daybreak today, lobster season actually began hours earlier, at the stroke of midnight, when hundreds of scuba divers typically converge on Laguna Beach and other coastal waters to hunt for the night-crawling creatures.

The season, which begins the first Wednesday of every October, lasts until the first Wednesday after the 15th of March, which in 1990 will fall on March 21.

But with ever-increasing hordes of fishermen in competition, Gallagher and others say it should take only a short time for everyone to deplete the seas of catchable crustaceans.

“We catch 75% the first four days,” Gallagher said. “By Thanksgiving, it (the season) is pretty much over.”

Despite the growing popularity of the pastime, the species of spiny lobster that inhabits the Southern California coastline does not appear to be in any danger.

In fact, figures from the California Department of Fish and Game indicate that the crustacean is thriving, with a record haul of 634,468 pounds in the state reported last season. The lobster catch has been increasing steadily since 1975, when a record low of 152,000 pounds was tallied statewide.

Although the figures are for the entire coast, they come primarily from Southern California, Fish and Game officials say, as the crustaceans do not generally venture into the colder waters north of Santa Barbara.

Fish and Game officials attribute the growth in the lobster population to state legislation in 1975 requiring escape ports in trap cages for below-limit adolescent lobsters. Before those ports were mandated, young and old lobsters alike were scooped up into the traps, causing a steady decline in the species, said Dave Parker, a Fish and Game marine biologist in Long Beach.

The vast bulk of the lobster catch is made by commercial fishermen, who have no limits other than not taking in any lobster less than a regulation 3 1/4 inches long, Parker said. Sport fishermen, by contrast, are restricted to seven lobsters per day.

But commercial fishermen complain that some divers raid their traps and make off with much more than their daily allotment. One fishermen said a surfer once used his board to lift a heavy trap and remove the contents.

Some divers take this illegal shortcut because it is extremely difficult to capture the elusive lobster by hand, Parker said. A wary creature by nature, lobsters tend to congregate in rock and coral formations where they can quickly scurry out of reach, he said.

“They tend to move faster than you do,” Parker said. “And they maintain as many as three escape routes.”

The commercial fishermen don’t have to be concerned with the speed or elusiveness of their prey. They merely bait a cage with mackerel and wait for a lobster to follow its nose inside, where a trap door swings shut.

Although it sounds easy enough, it involves a lot of work and preparation. For example, the first order of business for Rick Gallagher was building his 3-foot-square and 3-by-4-foot metal cages by hand.

“See these,” he said, extending heavily blistered and callused palms. “That’s from making these things.”

Weighing up to 60 pounds apiece, the cages are then fitted with up to 30 feet of yellow-colored line, at the end of which a buoy marker is attached. Each fishermen uses his own color to distinguish his catch from the rest. Gallagher chose pink for his.

Last weekend, Gallagher set out his first 20 traps along the coast just north of Dana Point Harbor. On Monday, he worked with boat skipper Todd Mansur, 23, of Dana Point, and deckhand Jeff Belet, 18, of Dana Point, to throw out another 84.

The trap-setting was long, arduous work, interspersed with rest breaks of potato chips and cold beer. Working about a mile off the coast between Dana Point Harbor and the San Clemente Pier--six miles away--Mansur maneuvered the 40-foot Cyperlurus into position as Gallagher directed and Belet hefted the cages gently overboard.

“I’ve been doing this for about six years,” Belet said, straining under the load of a cage he was about to drop into the turquoise-green water. “It’s fun, if we don’t lose our traps. A bad storm can cause sand to fill up the trap so that you can’t move it. Or, it can go under rocks and get smashed up and useless.”

Intermittent large swells on Monday gave a hint of storm activity elsewhere in the Pacific. Gallagher looked at the swells with some concern, but then shrugged his shoulders, saying that the vulnerability of the traps makes the whole lobster business something of a gamble.

“The problem is everything can look great, like today, and then a storm comes along,” Gallagher said. “Then you’re dead.”

It costs about $50 to outfit each cage, Gallagher said. Because up to 20 one-pound lobsters can be caught in each trap--and with lobster now fetching up to $6 a pound--Gallagher figures his operation stands to net $120 per cage, or more than $10,000 for all the cages he has put out.

That’s not exactly peanuts, but at the same time Gallagher doesn’t view it as having the same kind of profit-making potential as taking boatloads of paying fishermen out.

“I don’t think you can look at this (lobster fishing) as a livelihood,” he said. “It’s something else to do on the water. It means just getting out of the house.”

For Monday’s trap-setting operation, Gallagher chose the shallower waters just off the coast, where spiny lobsters spend each summer spawning eggs before retreating to deeper waters for the winter.

He was particularly interested in dropping traps around kelp beds, which grow from the kind of rock formations that lobsters love to inhabit. Mansur, the skipper, also monitored a video screen on a Fathometer that reveals ocean depth as well as whether there are rocky or sandy conditions on the bottom.

“It’s all hard bottom here,” Mansur said as he squinted his eyes to look into the Fathometer while cruising slowly through one large kelp bed off San Clemente. “It’s perfect.”

“Todd,” Gallagher called out from the deck about that time, “let’s put one in here. We found a lot in here one year.”

The crew wound up setting out a half-dozen traps in that same location. They had been preceded by several other fishermen, whose earlier presence was evidenced by black, yellow and red buoys bobbing in the vicinity.

When the crew had finished about two hours later, they headed back to shore, prepared to return Tuesday morning to pull the traps up from the water and load them with bait. Under state law, commercial fishermen are allowed to bait their traps the day before lobster season begins.

“Rick, you gonna remember any of this?” Belet asked Gallagher in reference to the location of all the traps.

“It’s gonna be so easy,” Mansur chimed in with a grin, pointing at a long line of pink buoys receding into the distance toward Dana Point Harbor. “It’s gonna be a straight line.”

SPINY LOBSTERS

Name: Spiny lobsters make up the genus Panulirus and are also called sea crayfish. Panulirus interruptus is the California spiny lobster of the Pacific coast.

Where found: Spiny or rock lobsters are found along the Pacific coast of North America, the African coasts, the Caribbean and the coasts of Australia and New Zealand.

Uses: In various other European countries and in the United States, the frozen tails of spiny lobsters are marketed as rock lobsters.

Description: Unlike true lobsters, members of the Palinuridae family (so called because of their very spiny bodies), do not have large claws. Usually only the abdomen is eaten and is marketed as lobster tail. The antennae are strongly developed. Most species live in tropical waters.

Habitat: They spend their days in crevices in rock or coral, emerging by night to forage for invertebrate prey. They return from their nightly wanderings to dens within a feeding range of hundreds of meters, and after several weeks they may move several kilometers to a new location.

Source: World Book Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica and Collier’s Encyclopedia.