I was in my twenties, working at Continental Maritime in San Diego. Hard work, good money, and a liver that hadn’t yet learned how to quit. I had a buddy, Rod, who lived up in La Jolla. We were doing the usual “guy stuff”—racquetball, chasing tail, and drinking enough tequila to kill a small horse.
One night, we brought two girls back to his place. We’re sitting outside, the ocean air thick in our lungs, beers in hand, and Rod gets this look in his eye. The look of a man about to propose a felony.
”You know,” he says, “we should have lobster for breakfast.”
The girls? They lit up like Christmas trees. Cheerleaders for the apocalypse.
”How?” I asked.
”The Cove,” he said.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, the La Jolla Cove isn’t just a beach. It’s a State Marine Reserve. A sanctuary. It is highly illegal to take anything out of that water. It’s a safe space for seals and fish and… well, lobsters. Which meant the lobsters down there were the size of goddamn house cats because they had zero predators.
Until us.
I couldn’t pass it up. Lobster for breakfast? Something illegal? Beautiful women egging us on? It was the holy trinity of bad decisions.
Rod, the professional, pulls out a $100 underwater flashlight. A real piece of gear. Me? He hands me a rinky-dink hardware store flashlight and a box of Ziploc bags.
”Here,” he says.
We put the flashlight in the bag. Then we duct-taped the bag to my hand to create a “waterproof seal.” At the time, it sounded like engineering genius. Later, when I was ripping half the hair off my arm trying to get it off, it felt like torture. But in the moment? I was ready.
We grabbed our fins, snorkels, and a mesh bag, and we marched down to the cove in the middle of the night.
The ocean was pitch black. Ink. And you could hear them—the seals. Barking, splashing, making a ruckus on the rocks. We were invaders in their living room.
We waded in. The water wasn’t warm. It was a cold, slapping shock to the system. Every step deeper, the water rising up your chest, your brain is screaming, “What the fuck are we doing? There are sharks out here. There are cops up there. This is stupid.” But the adrenaline? It keeps you warm. It keeps you moving.
We dropped in.
Rod clicks on his light. A beautiful, piercing beam that cuts through the murk and lights up the ocean floor. Me? I click mine on. It works for about thirty seconds. And then I see the water creeping into the bag. Fzzzt. Darkness.
So now, I’m bobbing in the swells, blind as a bat, holding my breath, diving down into the black abyss, guided only by the faint glow of Rod’s light somewhere off to my left.
It was terrifying. You’re dropping down, hands reaching out into the unknown, grabbing at rocks, seaweed, god knows what. Every shadow looks like a shark. Every seal bumping into you feels like a monster. I drank more saltwater than a man should survive.
But then… the beam hits the floor.
And there they are.
The Great Granddaddies of the lobster world. Just sitting there. No fear. Why would they run? They’re in a sanctuary. They looked at us like we were room service.
I dove. I reached out with my left hand—the one without the dead flashlight taped to it—and I grabbed a sucker. He fought. Powerful kicks, trying to break my grip. I hauled him up to the surface, gasping for air, threw him in the bag, and went back down.
Rod, with his high-tech gear, caught seven. I managed to wrangle three of the prehistoric beasts in the dark. Ten huge lobsters. A king’s ransom.
We dragged ourselves out of the surf, scratched up, bleeding from the rocks, exhausted, and triumphant. We snuck back to the apartment, avoiding the headlights, feeling like Navy SEALs who just raided a cartel kitchen.
We dumped the catch in the kitchen sink. The girls were squealing, half-disgusted, half-impressed. We cleaned them right there—huge, juicy tails, white meat bursting out of the shells. The whole apartment smelled like the sea.
We put the meat in the fridge. The girls were already heading to the bedroom. We followed.
The morning? That was the victory lap.
I woke up, tangled in sheets and warm limbs. I walked into the kitchen, cracked open a Pacifico, squeezed a lime into it, and fired up the barbecue.
We grilled those ten massive lobster tails in butter and garlic. We sat outside in the San Diego sun, shirts off, cuts and scrapes stinging in the salt air, drinking cold beer, eating the best goddamn breakfast of our lives. The girls were there, wearing our t-shirts, naked underneath, looking at us like we were gods.
You have to understand the picture. We were twenty. We were broke. We had no money to buy lobster at the store. But we had strength. We had stupidity. We had the sheer, unadulterated balls to go into a pitch-black ocean and take what we wanted.
There were no “Karens” lecturing us about the environment. There was no guilt. There was just the primal, beautiful satisfaction of the hunt.
Our strength was our currency. Our youth was our ticket.
And that, my friends, is exactly why those women were with us. Because for one night, and one glorious morning, we weren’t just guys working at a shipyard.
We were the kings of the goddamn coast.
