A Deep, Dark Quest for Spiny Lobster

Precisely one minute after midnight, a war whoop echoed across the water.

“Let’s go kick some lobster tail,” said Chad Thagard, positioning his dive mask.

His diving buddy, Chris Limon, needed no encouragement. After waiting seven months for the season to open--the last few hours suited up in his wetsuit--Limon was first to hit the water. He somersaulted backward off his boat into the inky blackness. Kersplash!

Limon’s wife, Kimel, and Thagard followed right behind.

These weren’t the only scuba divers to take a midnight plunge into the chilly Pacific in a hunt for “bugs,” their affectionate term for the California spiny lobster.

Bitten by bug mania, hundreds of divers last Saturday were on boats strategically anchored off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Laguna Beach, Malibu, Santa Barbara, Santa Catalina and other Channel Islands. Others clambered awkwardly in their scuba tanks and flippers over boulders that make up harbor breakwaters or pushed bravely through the waves on rocky beaches.

All were part of an annual Southern California tradition: diving for lobsters on the opening day of the season, or more precisely, opening night.

Lobsters are easier to catch after dark. The skittish crustaceans hide during the day, in crevices in the rocks or tucked under ledges. Only at night do they venture out, relying on the camouflage of pitch-black water to preserve their delicious tails.

Little did they know that this was the most dangerous night of the year.

Beams of light slashed back and forth across the sea floor as Thagard and the Limons advanced through the water like helicopters on a nocturnal search and capture mission.

Chris Limon, a former commercial diver, probed around submerged rocks, peeked under ledges and reached into holes. Then, his beam caught a pair of beady eyes, making them jump out of the darkness like tiny red beacons.

With a swift kick of his fins, Limon swam up and quickly snatched the lobster from the top with a gloved hand, careful not to be impaled by sharp horns on its head or sliced by the hooked barbs under its tail.

He pulled out a measuring device to make sure the lobster was of legal size, then quickly stuffed it into his yellow nylon mesh bag.

Under state law, a lobster cannot be taken until it measures at least 31/4 inches from the ridge of its eye socket to the rear edge of its body shell.

The California Fish and Game Department sets a minimum size to ensure that a lobster is old enough to have reproduced several times before it ends up on a plate with butter and garlic.

Divers cannot use spears or other tools to catch lobsters--only their hands. State officials imposed the hands-only rule because divers had been skewering, and killing, undersized lobsters before they could be measured, said Kristine Barsky, a Fish and Game marine biologist and co-author of “California Lobster Diving.”

Each recreational diver also is limited to seven lobsters a day--to keep from depleting the stable lobster population.

Santa Monica Bay had some of the most aggressive hunting on opening night, the activity inspired, in part, by Dive ‘n Surf of Redondo Beach, with its 25th annual all-night “Lobster Mobster” weigh-in contest.

Nearly 250 divers participated, proudly bringing in their wriggling catch through the night to claim a T-shirt or bigger prizes. The grand prize, a wetsuit, went to a diver with a lobster weighing 10.18 pounds.

Robbie Meistrell, the company’s chief executive, said he started the contest in the mid-1970s to encourage more scuba divers to experience the magical--if sometimes terrifying--realm of the ocean at night.

“It’s hard to get people to do a night dive,” Meistrell said. “If you are motivated to catch some lobsters, it helps you get over the fear.”

Most divers, after they’ve set aside their bravado, acknowledge that the ocean turns eerie, even spooky, after dark. A diver’s vision is limited to the shadowy forms that appear and disappear in the beam of a flashlight. Often, it’s impossible to identify a form on the edge of a diver’s narrow field of vision. Was it a shark?

“It creeps me out a little bit to go down the anchor line,” confided Kimel Limon.

But after she made it to the bottom, about 65 feet down, and the beam of her flashlight illuminated a lobster’s red eyes, her fears were vanquished by the thrill of the hunt.

As the sky began to lighten, she had landed the biggest bug of the threesome. Her husband had caught the most, reaching his legal limit after descending to a “secret spot.”

Thagard grumbled about being out of practice, about the big ones that got away.

“I had a good hole. I messed it up so bad. At least I didn’t get skunked,” he said, pulling out one lobster, one crab and two good-sized scallops. “It was a bouillabaisse dive.”