Rough seas in the Keys kept many lobster hunters off the water during the July 28 and 29 mini-season, but those who went out were glad they did.
"We had 20- to 22-knot winds with gusts to 25 and dirty water," said Jon Hazelbaker of Fort Myers Beach. "Nobody was out there - I loved it.
"But we we got plenty of lobster, and they were bigger than I've seen before. We got several 3-pounders."
Recreational lobster hunting in Florida is a big deal: Between July 1, 2010, and June 30, the state sold more than 140,000 recreational lobster licenses, including 13,678 to nonresidents.
But something is happening to the state's lobster population.
From 1990 to 2001, commercial fishermen landed an average of 6.5 million pounds of lobster a year, with a high of 7.8 million pounds in 1996. From 2000 through 2010, the average was 4.5 million pounds, with a low of 3.3 million pounds in 2005.
Lower landings indicate
fewer lobsters, and John Hunt, a research administrator at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute's Marathon Laboratory, believes the problem is PaV1, a fatal virus that infects juvenile lobsters.
"For all we can tell, the virus was historically part of the spiny lobster," Hunt said. "My personal theory is that in the late 1990s or early 2000s, something changed that allowed PaV1 to become more virulent.
"Either lobsters became more susceptible, or the virus mutated. We don't really know why or what changed."
Southwest Florida is not an important commercial or recreational lobster fishery because few lobsters are found here.
That's because lobster larvae from the Caribbean enter the Gulf of Mexico on the Loop Current, which flows north, loops around and flows south to the Keys.
But the Loop Current is beyond the continental shelf, so not many larvae settle off Southwest Florida.
Where they do settle is in the Keys, and that's where thousands of lobster hunters will be Saturday.
"It's like opening day at Coney Island," long-time Key West resident Pat Clyne said. "We get so many people coming down that U.S. 1 is one big parking lot.
"A lot of locals stay away from those people. Most of us have our own little spots we go to where there are tons and hundreds of lobsters."
All those people pouring into the Keys is good for the economy, said Sally Billiter, co-owner of Tilden's Scuba Center in Marathon.
"This year, the opening of lobster season is on a weekend, which is good for us," Billiter said. "The mini-season gauges what the regular season is going to be, and people who went out got lobster, and the lobster were big. The mini-season was rough, so there should be plenty of lobster left."
Florida's east coast gets plenty of lobster hunters, too, said John Ippolito, owner of Hypnautical Dive Charters in Riviera Beach.
"It's a circus, pure chaos," he said. "If I didn't make money at it, I wouldn't even go. This time of year, you get people who dive once or twice a year, people who have no business out on the water."
Diving conditions on the east coast are different from those in the Keys, Ippolito said.
"We have a lot more current," he said. "In the Keys, the bugs are tiny. We can get 7- to 8-pound bugs. But bugs are more frequent in the Keys."
Part-time Fort Myers resident Tom O'Brien will be making his first lobster dives Saturday.
Hazelbaker and Clyne have filled him in on the art of tickling lobsters into his net with a tickle stick.
"We're going to go down 20 or 30 feet and make them swim backward into our nets, that's what I figure," O'Brien said. "The first day, I'll be trying to figure out which way is backward. Everybody says it's as simple as one, two, three. Just tickle them, and they'll jump into the net."
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