California spiny lobster season opened at 6pm on Friday, October 2 and runs through March 17. Since then, ten of the twenty five hoop net trips the SoCal fleet has reported came back with a limit on board. Over the last week it was six of twelve.
The boats running these trips are averaging about 5.7 lobster per angler. The bag limit is seven.
And on a typical night there are only one or two of those trips reporting in all of Southern California.
What the boats are actually doing
These are per-boat numbers, not fleet averages. Each is that boat's own lobster divided by the anglers who were on it.
| Boat | Trips, 30 days | Per angler | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tradition (H&M) | 14 | 6.26 | 8 of 14 |
| Triton (LA Harbor) | 4 | 5.76 | 1 |
| Sport King (LA Harbor) | 1 | 6.00 | 0 |
| Gail Force (LA Harbor) | 5 | 3.91 | 0 |
| Ghost (22nd Street) | 1 | 7.00 | 1 |
| All boats | 25 | 5.69 | 10 of 25 |
A limit means seven lobster per angler on that trip, the legal maximum.
The Tradition has been the best of them and it is not close. Four trips this past week, four limits, 210 lobster for 30 anglers. Over the month it is at 6.26 per angler across fourteen trips.
The Gail Force is the low end at 3.91, which is still a better day than most fishing you will do this month.
Two boats that run hoop net trips do not appear here because we have no counts for them. The Pescador out of Redondo Beach has lobster departures on the schedule, but Redondo has never reported a lobster count to the report sites. The Got Bait out of Point Loma needs five people to sail and its recent departures went out with open seats. Their catch rates are unknown, not zero.
Now the part that should surprise you
Across the whole region, lobster accounted for 13 landing-days in the last week. Calico bass got 63. Whitefish got 48. Yellowfin got 37.
Among the species the fleet counts in any volume, lobster sits at the very bottom alongside lingcod.
Twenty five hoop net trips in a month, in a region with nineteen landings and more than a hundred and forty boats.
That is one night's bins from one trip. It is also, going by the numbers above, roughly what four out of ten of these trips look like.
Who is running them
LA Harbor Sportfishing runs the most, with Catalina lobster combo trips on the Gail Force, the Triton and the Sport King. Their own trip notes describe it as rockfish until dark, then hoop netting, limited to ten passengers. They have 149 of these scheduled, 127 of them publicly bookable.
Redondo Beach Sportfishing runs the Pescador on dedicated hoop net trips, limited to ten, departing 5pm and back by 10pm. 59 on the schedule.
22nd Street Landing runs the Ghost, a six-pack, and the Pride, which takes ten.
Point Loma Sportfishing runs the Got Bait as a six-pack with gear included. It needs five people to sail, so check before you plan around it.
H&M Landing runs the Tradition, which has produced about half of all the lobster in our counts this season. Its trips are not in our schedule data, so call H&M directly for those.
You can see most of them, with current prices and open seats, at findyournextcatch.com/trips?duration=Lobster. There are 205 with open seats right now.
The rules that actually get people cited
Lobster regulations are simpler than groundfish, which means there is no excuse for getting them wrong. Four things matter.
Seven is a bag AND possession limit. Not seven a day. Seven is what you are allowed to have, full stop. Three nights out does not get you twenty one in the freezer.
3.25 inch carapace minimum, measured when the net comes up. Carapace means the body shell, not the tail and not the whole animal. Measure it on the boat, not at the dock.
Hoop nets or your hands. No traps, no spears. Five hoop nets per person, ten per vessel.
A Spiny Lobster Report Card, in your possession, for every person of any age. This is the one people get wrong. You fill it in per date and per location as you go, and you return the data to CDFW by April 30 even if you never went out or caught nothing. Miss that and there is a non return fee on next season's card.
Check CDFW for anything beyond this, especially near a marine protected area. Rules change and I am not the authority on them.
What to do with them
Spiny lobster has no claws, so everything is in the tail. That changes how you cook it compared to a Maine lobster.
The simplest good version is to split the tail lengthwise, brush the meat with butter and garlic, and grill it shell side down until the meat turns opaque. Six to eight minutes depending on size. Do not flip it onto the meat.
Boiling works and is harder to ruin, but you lose some of what makes them worth the trip. If you boil, salt the water heavily and pull them the moment the shell turns bright red.
Either way, do not overcook it. Spiny lobster goes rubbery faster than almost anything else you will bring home.
Should you go
Four out of ten of these trips come back with limits, and six of the last twelve did. They get you home before midnight. The Pescador out of Redondo is the cheapest at $104 to $135, LA Harbor's combo trips run $210 to $225, and the six-packs are more.
I do not have a good explanation for why more people are not doing this. The season runs to March 17, so there is time to find out.
A note on the numbers: every figure above is per boat, that boat's lobster divided by the anglers who were on it. Our /intel page currently shows a fleet-wide rate instead, which divides by every angler at the landing that day, including people who were out fishing for tuna. For a species only a couple of boats target, those two numbers are very different. The per-boat figures are the ones that tell you what a hoop net trip actually produces.
Current lobster trips, with prices and open seats, are at findyournextcatch.com/trips?duration=Lobster.
Thanks to L.A. Waterfront Sportfishing for the photos.