Lobster Season Memories with Alli Penovich

As a Floridian, born and raised, lobster season has been a significant part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my favorite memories involve trips to the Keys, starting when I was around three years old. My dad would pack up the car and boat, and we would drive down, meeting our cousins, Grandpa, and whoever else decided to join us that year. I remember waking up while it was still dark, curled up in the front seat of the boat, wrapped in my princess sleeping bag. We would reach the reef as the sun rose and dive until we reached our limit. Dinners always featured fresh lobster, which I didn’t enjoy until many years later, but I always had fun catching them. It was like an Easter egg hunt, diving under a coral head or looking in an abandoned cooler, boat, or debris, never knowing what we would find.

Over the years, the lobsters I caught grew larger, and I began diving to greater depths. We started going to the Bahamas instead of the Keys, but I still looked forward to lobster season just the same. In the Bahamas, it is legal to shoot lobster with a polespear, which we would do, especially when we were younger. However, my most memorable lobster was caught on my favorite island in the Bahamas, on a side we normally didn’t have access to. On this day in 2018, the ocean was like a lake, so we ventured to this side for the first time. We jumped in, not knowing what we would come across. We were in about 30 feet of water with huge, lively structures. One of our friends spotted a massive lobster tucked up in a cave. I had a polespear in my hand, ready to get it, but he suggested I try grabbing it. I breathed up, swam down, and looked into the cave. An 8-pound lobster was staring right at me. I grabbed its knuckles as far back as I could and pulled it out. My hands were getting torn up by its spines, but this was my best chance to catch it. As I pulled the lobster out and swam up, its legs wrapped around my body—it was huge! It put up a fight on the way up, but my grip was strong, and I wasn’t going to let it go, no matter how much my hands were getting torn up. Every time we go diving during the season, my grandpa asks us to bring home a lobster. Needless to say, he was very happy when I put this one in the cooler.