The Lobster the Better
Posted By Paul Kotik on 15 August 2005
The spiny lobster is thought to have a life span in the range of 25 – 50 years. The older ones, which are by definition the smarter ones, can grow rather large: the biggest one taken to date weighed in at about 26 pounds and was over 3 feet long.
The bugs hang in the nooks and crannies of the coral reef, sometimes with other critters such as dozing nurse sharks, sometimes alone. The most basic piece of kit required by the sane hunter is a pair sturdy gloves, as the spiny lobster is, well, spiny. Additional tools for the traditionalist are a tickle stick and a net. A tickle stick is ( pay close attention now !) a stick, perhaps a bit less than one meter in length, which is poked into a suspected lobster hole in order to ( surprise !) tickle the creature and cause it to scamper away…with luck, into the hunter’s cunningly positioned net. One never knows, though, just which way the animal will flee, as the reef is a labyrinth and back doors abound. Sometimes they just disappear.
One of my buddies, a captain of American industry in his day job, turned out to be a devastatingly effective lobsterman. His uncanny instinct for identifying, from the surface, those reef formations most likely to harbor his prey filled his daily quota in short order.
I finished the day empty-handed, but then I had come equipped with a great excuse ( I hadn’t been diving in over a year ) and then imposed upon myself the additional handicap of restricting my equippage to my bare hands. When I was younger, quicker and stupider my practice was to stick my arm into promising crevices and grab the beasts, just like that. Sometimes I found I had the wrong address, and that I’d offered up my limb to more sinister species than the spiny lobster.
The State of Florida provides the ground rules which insure an abundant population of our prized bugs, year after year. In addition to a permit, all lobster hunters must be equipped with a standardized measuring tool against which the carpace of a dinner candidate must be measured. Three inches is the minimum for a keeper.
Lobsters can be taken legally in Florida waters only during the State-designated season, which this year runs from August 6 to March 31. There’s also a so-called “Sport Season”, known colloquially as the “short season”, which is a two-day orgy of all-out, crazed, storming-the-Bastille bugging, July 27-28. I have no idea what the origins or purposes of the Sport Season are, and as far as I can tell they are lost in antiquity and known to no one. This is Florida - whoever once knew probably just forgot.
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