(Maybe 1984)

Lake-like, I think. The usually rough Catalina channel is dead calm. No wind.

Motoring out to destination San Clemente Island with grandma Lorraine, Willie Dostal, my Dad and me aboard Alleluia today. We are casually redoubling the east end of Catalina. San Clemente is already visible about 20 miles away, this is my first trip there. I’m thrilled. It’s a beautiful day.

San Clemente is the stepchild of the Channel Islands. For years it’s been used by the military for target practice. Equidistant, Catalina as mainland, Catalina and San Clemente, way beyond Loran C range, It’s a little too far to casually sail there. There are no public commercial facilities. Instead, there are big bad rules about visiting it or going ashore at all. You have to go get a permit of some kind to land there and even then, you may be denied if there are scheduled operations during your planned visit. This, is a stark contrast with Catalina which is comparatively rife with commercial facility. No mooring cans, no Scout camps, I don’t even think there are emergency services there. But for goats and top secret military stuff, it’s more or less uninhabited.

It is also the fabled land of the lobsters. “They crawl across the bottom there!” All you want, yours for for the taking.

This trip is scheduled for a week or a little more. Alleluia is not terribly comfortable for four people, but it’s not *too* bad. Willie is outdoorsy, not scared of a little camping and the rest of us are family. The big challenge on long trips on the Alleluia is the refrigerator. Specifically, the problem is that there is none.

The strategy is simple. You fill the small-ish stainless steel ice box full of as much block ice and maybe a little dry ice as you can and once it melts, that’s the end of it.

Our goal for this trip is to get as much lobster as we can. My Dad, Willie and I will dive and catch it and my grandma will stay on deck and pack it and prepare it.

With little fanfare, apart from being strafed at low altitude by a pair of navy fighter jets, we successfully anchor and over the course of the next several days, experience the “lobster-palooza”.

These things are everywhere! The fables are true! Just crawling across the sand bottom. We easily take the, um, legal limit each day we dive.

So many lobsters! My grandmother, almost as passionate in her pursuit of lobster as my Dad, can hardly keep up. We eat lobster everything, lobster scrambled eggs for breakfast, peanut butter and lobster sandwich for lunch, barbecued lobster tacos for din, lobster protein drink for pre-dive energy, lobster everything everyday.

As quickly as the lobster accumulates, so does the ice deliquesce.

Lobster and all crustaceans, even when fresh, come with a small amount of bacteria as part of the deal. Normally it gets cooked out. When it starts to spoil though, it smells a little like bleach to me.

Towards the end of the week, the lobster keeps coming and the ice is gone. My lobster taco smells like it has Clorox salsa on it.

I cannot think of a way of preparing lobster that we haven’t already done at least twice.

Thankfully, nobody got sick, although I notice nobody’s was eating the lobster meat either.

As we motor back, same lake like channel, I’m pretty sure I’ve just received a life time supply of lobster.