‘Did you say you’re going diving for crayfish, make sure you catch an extra one for me.’ If I could have a crayfish for every time I have been asked to catch an extra crayfish I would probably have enough to give some away, come to think of it, I would probably still keep them for myself.

Spiny Rock Lobster is generally what people are referring to when talking about saltwater crayfish which can be found all around Australia, however the most delicious varieties inhabit the shores of the south eastern corner of Australia and Tasmania. These beasties can be found in shoreline rock pools or as deep as 200 meters and can grow in excess of 5kg, they are aggressively targeted by professional fisherman with traps, however a dedicated hoard of recreational divers persist with the art of catching their ‘crays’ by hand.

Despite popular belief rock lobster are actually fairly difficult to catch by hand, they are rarely seen out in the open and often the biggest ones inhabit the deepest rock crevices and caves that are simply to narrow and deep to fit inside even if you are confident enough to take your entire SCUBA kit off and squeeze inside with nothing but your regulator clamped firmly between your teeth. Oh, and did I mention that here in Victoria you cannot use any implements or tools to assist in the capture of Crayfish while diving; they can only be taken by hand. On top of all of this the areas that crayfish generally inhabit are often wave swept and shallow, attracting an intolerable amount of surge on anything but the calmest of days. One such place is the Twelve Apostles region in western Victoria.

The township of Peterborough in smack bang in the middle of the Apostles’ region and even though the area is a popular tourist destination Peterborough itself seems to have been running late the day the tourist gravy train came through. It is still just as sleepy and underdeveloped as it was fifteen years ago, a stark contrast to nearby Port Campbell which has boomed like many other coastal towns in the last decade. Despite this the caravan park at Peterborough is still our first choice to set up base camp as it is barely a stones throw to literally dozens of great dive sites.

So what makes the Twelve Apostles so attractive to the thousands of crayfish that inhabit its rocky shoreline? Basically, the entire area is like a sandstone honeycomb of rock openings and ledges covered in kelp and sea grass, these reefs then extend out to sea for hundreds of meters and beyond. The outer extremity of this shallow reef, which can vary between one and ten meters, is protected by the large freestanding rocks known as the Apostles. Even further out from these are offshore reefs also inhabited by good numbers of ‘crays’. With so many places to go it’s almost difficult to decide where to start.

Well for the inexperienced diver its probably not a good place to start at all due to the strong surge and undulating bottom which can disorientate you as sometimes it gets shallower the further you go out and when you finally surface you’re pointing in the wrong direction, hundreds of meters from land. Definitely don’t leave your dive compass at home. Furthermore, these shallow, undulating dives offer enormous bottom time and the elusion of safety; many divers have found themselves ‘bent’ after diving three times in one day for extended periods. For those readers who are not divers and don’t fully understand the chemistry behind the bends, I’ll give you a quick rundown.

Nitrogen is absorbed into the blood when we breath at sea level, as you dive deeper you absorb more nitrogen than at the surface due to the pressure, if you rise too quickly this nitrogen can form into gas bubbles in the bloodstream causing the painful condition known as the bends. Because this residual nitrogen must be breathed out to get rid of it, most dives are planned so that the diver descends to the deepest point first and gradually works their way up, allowing ample time to exhale any residual nitrogen during the slow ascent. Diving the twelve apostles can be a bit different; most dives here start shallow, then deep, then shallow, then deep and so on. Many of the best areas are littered with holes and channels in the rock that force you to ascend during the dive to get to the next gutter. This is what we refer to in diving as a saw tooth profile dive, because if you were to graph your dive by depth against time it would resemble the teeth of a wood saw. The result is that your body is absorbing nitrogen at an uneven rate and ultimately it is not being expelled at the rate you might think leading to a dangerous levels of nitrogen in the blood. Now before you go and cancel your dive course for fear of the ‘bends’ it is important to remember that the chance of this occurring can be almost totally eliminated with adequate training and the proper use of a dive computer. These days the hyperbaric chamber is generally reserved for football stars with bad knees or a hamstring injury.

So, now that we are all experts on diver safety it time to focus on catching the quarry. When you actually come face to face with your first crayfish a real battle of wills begins, you will generally have something it wants, a piece of bait being abalone or a slice of fish, and the ‘cray’ has something you want, being its tail and delectable legs. However, you don’t want to push your bait too far into the hole as you can’t reach the base of the crayfishes’ antennae, and the ‘cray’ seems to know exactly the danger point of its lair that it simply will not venture past. Now if you’re thinking what your other hand is doing at this point, once the cray has got the bait surely you should be able to grab it, well think again. The situation will go something like this.

You find a cray, offer it a bait to tempt it away from the back of its hole, it may come forward and grab the bait, at which point you will be trying to position your free hand as close as possible to the head and legs of the cray. It will usually direct its long antenna towards anything that is suspect, like your free hand. Even the tiniest movement can send the cray scrambling to the back of its cave again. Add to this the strong surge from the surf overhead which further forces unwelcome movement. If by this stage the crayfish is still playing ball its time to go for glory, get a strong grip on the spiny base of its antenna and don’t give an inch. The cray will wedge itself against anything near it, I have witnessed 15 minute deadlocks between diver and crayfish where nether would let go. A skillful diver should be able to extract even the most stubborn cray in tact; some of my own captures have been less graceful with the odd leg or antenna missing.  

Don’t forget to measure your catch before ascending to the surface and trim the tail fin of your lobster as soon as you get to shore or back on board your vessel, any undersized lobster should be returned as close to the area where they were captured as possible. The legal size for recreationally caught rock lobster in Victoria is 11cm across the carapace for males and 10.5cm for females with a daily bag limit of 2 per person and a maximum possession limit of four at any time. This may not sound like much but four decent lobsters should be enough to keep any diver happy.

The only thing left to do now is go out to get your diving license and an unlimited number of tasty lobster are only one dive away, well it sounded good in the brochure, although not quite that simple, if nothing else you should now have a healthy appreciation of the effort some one has gone through should you ever receive a lobster as a gift.