Divers Take Measure of Lobster Catch : Channel Islands: Fishing boats and scuba enthusiasts begin the hunt for the tasty crustaceans just after midnight.

Lobster fever hit the Ventura County coast at exactly 12:01 Wednesday morning.

Hundreds of scuba divers and a handful of commercial fishing vessels converged on the Channel Islands for the traditional madness that marks the opening of the state’s six-month lobster season.

While the commercial fisherman baited traps laid earlier in the week, sport divers readied themselves to enter the water just before midnight Tuesday.

Divers are only allowed to grab lobsters--called “bugs” in diving lingo--by hand. And the bugs hide out between cracks and crevices that are coated with pointy red, brown and purple sea-urchins.

But the divers Wednesday morning were undaunted.

Ted Cummings searched for a good lobster spot while steering his boat, the Spectre, toward Anacapa’s west side about an hour before the divers hit the water.

“Anacapa Island is one of the best spots for lobster, because there’s so many cracks and caves,” Cummings said.

The night trip marked the fifth straight year that Cummings has taken part in the opening night hoopla, commonly referred to as “bug fever,” that surrounds the start of lobster season.

The phenomenon is stoked by the fact that lobsters are nocturnal feeders and by the rumor that more lobsters are captured at night in the first month of the season than at any other time over the next five months.

Practically every vessel in the Southern California sport-diving fleet was scheduled to make a Channel Islands dive trip in the first week of the lobster diving season.

Most of the diving boats based in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties headed to Anacapa Island. At less than 30 miles from shore, the island can be reached in just over an hour.

For many of the divers, the night itself presented as many challenges as the elusive lobsters that they were trying to catch.

“Diving at night,” said Dwight Roberts, a Sun Valley resident on his first opening night dive, “is a bit like walking into a pitch-black room with nothing but a match or a lighter to guide the way.”

The 25 divers on the Spectre used a variety of night-diving equipment to work against the darkness, with everything from wide-sweeping spotlights to bright, direct halogen flashlights employed to spot lobsters.

Only one diver on the Spectre brought up a lobster from the first dive. This left many others pondering their opening night luck and provided very little work for the California Department of Fish and Game marshal who boarded the Spectre about 2 a.m. Wednesday.

As the divers went down a second time, the lobsters came out. Afterward, some explained their techniques. Others discussed recipes. And some talked about the ones that got away.

“I found three big bugs in a hole,” said Tujunga resident Jarn Heil, Roberts’ diving partner. “I went for the biggest one, and he got away, but I trapped the other two in there. The first one, though. . . . Man, I should have had that one.”

Roberts matched Heil’s two lobsters and brought in two more for a total of four, the most lobsters taken by any of the Spectre’s divers. The legal limit for a sport diver is seven.

“I was trying to hypnotize the lobster with the light in my left hand, and then come up behind him with my right,” he said.

“If the lobsters are too big you have to drop your light at the last minute and use two hands. I should have done that a few times, but I didn’t think they were that big,” Roberts said.

Oxnard resident Berno Pioli, a sales manager for an office machine company, said it was teamwork that allowed him and his diving partner to catch three lobsters. “I backed him into the corner,” Pioli said of one of their prizes.

“Then I grabbed him and my buddy bagged him. You can’t do it by yourself, otherwise you’ll lose them,” he said.

Not all the divers had this sort of luck.

Richard Hladysh of Simi Valley grabbed at least 10 lobsters from the urchin-covered rocks, but all proved to be too small--less than 3 1/4 inches not counting the tail--after being measured by crew members on board.

Bob Beylik, a cucumber farmer from Fillmore who said he has done more than 100 dives in the past year, also came up lobster-less.

“I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time tonight. I saw two really big ones, but they were way deep in a hole and those were the only decent-sized ones I saw.”