(circa 1984)

“I can’t believe we are doing this”, I remember thinking as the boat’s fiberglass hull rhythmically pounds on the light chop of hurricane gulch in Long Beach harbor.

My Dad, Willie Dostal, my lifelong friend Jason and I are in the Boston Whaler, a small 13’ tender with a 40 horsepower outboard motor, Think of it as a pickup truck for the ocean. We are smoking a trail towards the Long Beach harbor breakwater in search of, what else, lobster. It’s cold, it’s late, dusk.

I’m nervous.

All of our gear, tanks, wetsuits, buoyancy compensators, are banging away on the floorboards of the whaler as we speed towards the breakwater. We’re going fast, maybe 30 mph. It’s cold.

If Cambells made Spinach soup it would be the exact color of this water…. This is the time of evening when daylight passes the relay baton to pitch black dark night… Moonlight is nowhere to be found.

This will be my first night dive, I think Jason’s too.

The Long Beach breakwater… One HELL of an uninviting place for any kind of dive. The breakwater is nothing more than a pile of huge basalt boulders that converts the untamed Pacific Ocean outside into this opaque green veggie stew in the harbor.

More than once, I’ve spotted rabid outcast junkyard-dog blue sharks patrolling this place during the day, A lot more than once… I’ll bet they positively teem here at night.

I’m nervous.

The plan is to start the dive at dusk and and surface after dark. We will descend down the anchor line to the base of the breakwater and then, using our dive lights, scour the snaggletoothed crevasses between the basalt boulders for the big granddaddy of all lobsters the we are certain must live there.

We anchor in about 45 feet of water, my Dad and Willie quickly gear up and unceremoniously jump in and are gone.

Jason and I exchange pensive looks… “that’s IT?” Dude… this is CRAZY. We have a rope tether and a single dive light between us. After a little more ruminating, we have come all this way, so we reluctantly gear up and jump in.

The dive was a terrifying waste of of time, somehow both paralyzingly frightening and totally uninteresting at the same time. In near zero visibility on our descent, we lost the anchor line almost immediately. Jason has the only light and every time I glimpse the line, he aims it frenetically elsewhere. Every time he aims it elsewhere, I could swear that I saw a shadowy silhouette of the rabid blue shark patrol. Nonetheless, we descend to about 20 feet, “look around” in the poor visibility afforded by the green harbor broth, wash, rinse, repeat, we never even made it to the bottom. We resurface in less than ten minutes.

we clamber back into the whaler and strip our gear. It’s pitch black. What a lousy dive.

Waiting. Pensively. We see no telltale bubbles. No sign of Dad or Willie.

Ten minutes, twenty. Seems like hours. It’s really dark and cold. We are…. Anxiously waiting.

Willie surfaces with no catch, boards, strips his gear and joins in our waiting focus group. No words are exchanged.

We are now aggressively waiting

Maximum bottom time on our tanks is only about 40 or 45 minutes…

Ahem. Waiting.

Dad finally surfaces and flips his mask up…”OH MY GOD!!!”

What? Shoot… the blue shark brute squad is coming for him?

“THIS THING ALMOST KILLED ME!!!”

the largest granddaddy lobster I have ever seen or even heard of is slammed down on the floorboards. The only catch of the dive.

To this day I have never seen a larger lobster.