Taking your gloves off reduces grip strength, and the ensuing embarrassment just may be caught on camera

How Not To Catch a Crayfish

AtlasProject
3 min readMar 14, 2015

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Catching a crayfish is easy: take a deep breath, free-dive down to the ocean floor, avoid the crayfish’s feelers, and pick it up by the back of its torso with your hand. The only difficulty is, well, every one of those maneuvers. Allow me to explain, in slightly more detail.

Requirements for catching crayfish in the Fiordland are as follows: the thickest wetsuit you can find, an even thicker top with a hood, mask, snorkel, well-treaded gloves, booties, large fins (at least larger than I’m used to), and a weight belt. Yes, you’re trying to drown yourself. Once you’ve completed the awkward dance moves required to get into the wetsuits, you’re ready to go to the dive site, which is apparently 15–25ft deep, though converting from meters to feet is unnecessarily difficult for me.

The easiest way not to catch a crayfish is to get all geared up, jump in, and realize you forgot to put on your fins. Warning: weight belts do not have an on or off button.

Rules of Crayfishing: All catch attempts shall be ruled incomplete if you do not return to the surface.

If you’ve managed to survive this icy plunge, your next task is to keep up with the dive masters, who, mind you, could do this in their sleep. You don’t see anything yet, you’re eyes are still thawing from the initial plunge, but the others insist this cove is full of the lobster-like creatures. Next thing you know, the divemasters spout like a humpback and dive deftly down into the world of the fishes. Just as you start to wonder if they are ever coming back to the surface, you realize they’ve been trying to get your attention:

‘It’s right here! Come get it!’.

But you’re a little nervous and you happily wave them off, permitting them to show you how it’s done first. After returning to the surface for a quick breath, one of them dives down and snatches the creature. Just like that. So easy. You can do this! After another demo from the divemaster, you got next.

Another crayfish is spotted, this time a little shallower, and clear of the coral heads, easy picking! This is your first one though, you want to scout out the area and make sure you aren’t overlooking some important aspect, so you do a test run which only results in alarm bells within your lungs. You blast off and complete a full, orca-like breach at the surface. (It was pretty impressive, actually, if you ask me) You didn’t see anything, but you’re way too cool to do another test run, besides, the opportunity might slip away!

This time, you pay more attention to your breathing exercise before you dive, pleading for just 5 more seconds of bottom time. Clearing your ears on the way down, and grabbing a rock for stability since you inexplicably don’t have enough weight on your belt to keep you down, you imagine you are a leopard expertly stalking your prey (a leopard with it’s feet floating wildly above its head), peering over the coral, waiting for the right moment to strike, you can hear the suspenseful music… but this has not been communicated to your lungs. You wait until you just can’t take the alarm bells anymore, then you jab at the crayfish with your hand (much slower than you envisioned) and swipe, not just one, but both feelers on the way down. Crayfish escape backwards, so you end up desperately attempting to grab the front claws as you continue your swipe. No! I will not be denied!

Rules of Crayfishing: Grabbing of the front claws is forbidden, and will result in surprising pain.

Clawing back to the surface (see what I did there?) with more than just your ego hurt, you realize you have just demonstrated, to a ‘T’, how NOT to catch a crayfish.

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AtlasProject

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