I LOVE this story:

Diver captures colossal lobster
… “On one of my dives, I found a hole, poked my head in and couldn’t believe how big this lobster was,” Fulks said. “I never dreamed I’d ever see a lobster that big.”

“I reached in and grabbed him by the antennae around the thick part at the base, and he didn’t move,” Fulks said. “He was just big and slow, but he held onto the cave’s sides really tight. I had to pull really hard to get him out. When I got him out, he looked like the biggest thing I’d ever seen. I put him under my arm and expected him to kick the heck out of me as I surfaced, but he never did.”

“David saw me swimming with it, and he couldn’t figure out what I had under my arm. When I got it to the beach and we looked at it, I said, ‘This could be someone’s pet. We could put a collar and a leash on it and take it for a walk.’ ”

They took it home, snapped some pictures and took some measurements. The carapace was 7 inches long (more than twice the length of a legal lobster’s required 3¼ inches from eye socket to the edge of the carapace), and the lobster measured 20 inches from eyes to tail. It takes spiny lobsters five to seven years just to reach legal size of 1 to 1½ pounds, so a lobster 12 pounds likely is 20 years old or more. Fulks figures Ralph is at least 40. Spiny lobsters can live to be 50, and the biggest ever recorded went 26 pounds and was 3 feet long.

“The more we looked at him the more we realized there was no way we could kill him,” Fulks said. “In the course of his long life – what, 30 to 40 years? – to grow to that size he must have dodged all kinds of divers grabbing after him, hundreds of lobster traps.”

Knowing how unique Ralph was they decided to release him to the protected La Jolla Underwater Park.