September 1 is circled in red on many seafood lovers’ calendars, to mark the first day of lobster season in Bermuda.Stuart Joblin is one of them. He’s been sport diving for spiny lobsters for the last 20 years.“I bought a boat, because I wanted to get out on the water,” he said. “At the time I was getting into scuba diving. A couple of friends of mine went lobster diving.“With lobstering, it is only free diving, there is no scuba diving allowed.“A couple of really good friends took me out and showed me how to do it, and I was lucky enough to catch one on my first time out. Then I was hooked.”Of course, the lobster was not “hooked” or speared. It was noosed, the only legal way to catch them.“I sell nooses in my store that I designed with a friend of mine after years of trial and error,” said Mr Joblin, owner of Makin’ Waves. “These are Caribbean spiny lobsters so they are very spiny, but have no claws.“You find them in caves or holes in the reef during the day. When you find one, you put the noose over its tail and you pull hard, because you don’t want the lobster to go back further into a hole.”Mr Joblin said it sometimes feels a little mean catching them when they are at rest in their cave. It is possible to catch them at night, but it is a little more difficult because they are feeding and more active.“You don’t have to go down that deep to catch them,” said Mr Joblin. “The two biggest lobsters I ever caught, one was in water that was so shallow I couldn’t dive down. I had to gently grab the bottom and pull myself down.“It was in arm-deep water. That was an over ten-pound lobster. It was on a little coral head a couple miles off the west end.“You can go eight to 12 miles offshore in some places and still stand and Bermuda is just a smudge on the horizon. Mind you, you can take two steps and suddenly find yourself in 6ft of water.”To Mr Joblin, almost every day is a potential lobstering day during season.“If I get a day off, and there is a storm out there, but it is not named, I will go somewhere,” he said. “My boat, Makin Waves 2.1, is big enough and when it is stormy I sometimes head for the flats on the north side of the Island.“The water around there is so shallow it breaks down the waves. It will be very rough getting there, but once you are there, it is fine. I just like being out on the water.”He said catching lobsters was a lot of fun and also great exercise. It was also a good way to experience the wonders of Bermuda’s marine world.“You never know what you are going to see,” he said. “We see eagle rays and turtles all the time, and all sorts of fish. We have come across wreck sites.“Unfortunately, we find trash too. We pick that up whenever we can. Last season, I think we saw more lobsters than usual. I think that since the fish pot regulations were implemented a few years ago there are many more fish, in general, out there.”Lobster season lasts from September 1 to March 31. Although the water can be quite chilly in the winter, Mr Joblin thought there was at least one advantages to catching them at that time.“The water is much clearer in the winter,” said Mr Joblin. “Not as much of the phytoplankton lives in the winter time because the water is too cold for it.“In the summer the coral blooms and you get plankton and other stuff floating in the water which degrades the water visibility.“In the winter, I have been out scuba diving in 110ft of water and you can see fish swimming on the bottom. That is getting close to the theoretical limit of how far you can see underwater, but it is cold and you have to dress appropriately.”He said if you wanted to catch lobsters, the first and most important thing you needed was a licence from marine and fisheries. You also needed a noose, mask, snorkel and fins.“I would certainly recommend gloves as lobsters are spiny,” he said. “Lobsters’ whips [antennae] can be 3ft long and are covered in little razor sharp spines.“When you noose them they are less than enthused about this happening so they fight back a little bit. They scrape their whips across you and you get little scratches.“Kevlar gloves are the best thing I have found to lessen the amount of scrapes and scratches. They are not impenetrable, however. I also recommend a longsleeve sun shirt to protect your skin.“Almost every spine on the lobster faces forward. If you are grabbing them, grab them from the back so you are less likely to poke yourself but you are going to end up with scratches. That is just the way it is.”Lobsters are often boiled alive Mr Joblin believed this to be inhumane.“You can not kill the lobsters at sea,” he said. “You have to wait until you get back to the dock.“This is because fisheries or conservation services might want to have a look at them. They check to make sure they are the right size, and that they don’t have any spear holes in them.“To kill the lobsters, I have a thick-bladed knife and I pop it right between their eyes which is where their brain is located. It kills them fairly quickly.“Because I am lazy, I then cut the tail out which is where most of the meat is. I know some people like to go through and pick out the meat from the legs and so forth.”Lobster lore has it that bigger lobsters have tougher meat and the smaller ones are more tender.Mr Joblin, however, said he thought their tenderness had more to do with how you cooked them.“I like them barbecued,” he said. “Lobster has a particular aroma that not everyone is appreciative of.“I do not like cooking them inside the house. I don’t like to boil them or do them in the broiler. I split them in half, butterfly them, wrap them in tinfoil twice, to keep the moisture in.“I put my barbecue on high and cook them eight to 12 minutes on each side.”Sometimes he partially cooks them on the barbecue, then uses them to make tacos or salad. For this you remove the chewier bits of the meat, and then cut the rest up.You sauté it in a pan with garlic, fresh red pepper and Mexican spices. Then just add to an ordinary taco or salad.You can catch two lobsters per person per licence per day during season.You are not allowed to sell them, trade them or barter them, unless you are a commercial fishermen, in which case a different set of rules apply.“Being able to catch lobsters is a privilege,” said Mr Joblin.The annual Makin’ Waves Sport Diving Lobster Tournament takes place on September 1. Registration is $15 at the Church Street store. The competition starts at sunrise, with weigh-in at the Dinghy Club at 5pm. Rain date is September 15.