Spiny lobster: season, sport season and bag limits

Two seasons, one of them only two days long

Florida has a regular spiny lobster season and, shortly before it opens, a two-day sport season that most people call the mini-season. The regular season runs from 6 August through 31 March; from 1 April through 5 August no lobster may be harvested or held, wherever it was taken.

The sport season is the one visitors run into, because for two days the water over every reef in the Keys is full of boats. The rule does not give it a date. It says the season “shall occur during the last Wednesday and successive Thursday of July each year” — a sentence that never needs amending, and that fixes the day as firmly as a date would. For 2027 the last Wednesday of July is the 28th, so the sport season falls on Wednesday 28 and Thursday 29 July 2027. Those two dates are worked out here from the rule; no agency has published them, and none needs to.

In those two days you may harvest by diving or with a bully net or hoop net, and by no other means. Traps come later: they may be baited and set from the Saturday immediately following the sport season, and harvesting or selling lobster from those traps while they soak before the season opens is prohibited.

What the Keys do differently

Monroe County has its own rules inside the sport season, and they are the ones a crew anchored off Key Largo needs.

Harvest by diving at night is prohibited — from one hour after official sunset until one hour before official sunrise. The bag limit is 6 a day rather than the 12 that applies in most of the state, and Biscayne National Park is treated the same way. On the second day, a harvester who has landed and left those waters may hold twice the day’s figure: 12 in the Keys and in Biscayne, 24 elsewhere.

And John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park is closed to lobster for those two days. The rule’s heading says “Closure During Two-day Sport Season”, which reads like a closed park, and it is worth reading the paragraph instead: what is forbidden is harvesting, and possessing lobster in or on park waters — “except for persons transiting park waters in a vessel”. Passing through is what the rule provides for. The exception stops short of a vessel someone is diving from, which is the one case where a boat in park waters with lobster aboard is prohibited outright.

Seven coral areas, in force all season

The same Pennekamp rule carries a second part that has nothing to do with the sport season and matters far more to a boat that spends a week there. Through the whole regular season, no lobster may be taken and no trap set in seven named areas of the park: Turtle Rocks, Basin Hill, Higdon’s Reef, Cannon Patch, Mosquito Bank N., Mosquito Bank S.E. and Three Sisters. Each is described in the rule as a polygon with its corner coordinates, which is also why they are not drawn here — these pages are not a chart.

Beyond those seven, the rule reaches every patch reef in the park: no harvest, no trap, from or within any coral formation. In Biscayne National Park the equivalent is shorter and broader — no harvest and no trap in the park’s Coral Reef Protection Areas, by reference to another rule chapter.

Size, and the thing you have to carry

A lobster with a carapace of 3 inches or less may not be taken or kept, and a tail separated from the body must measure at least 5 1/2 inches, with any protruding muscle tissue left out of the measurement. On state waters the animal stays whole: wringing the tail off is prohibited there, and so is holding a tail that was wrung off.

If you harvest by diving, you carry a measuring device in the water with you, and each measurement happens in the water. That is the part most visiting crews get wrong, and it is the easiest to get right.

Why this page quotes the code and not the commission

Every figure above comes from rule chapter 68B-24 in the Florida Administrative Code, as published by the Department of State. The commission’s own summary pages were unreachable when this page was written — the whole domain answers with HTTP 403 — so nothing here rests on them. For a rule, that is the better order anyway: the code is the text that is enforced, and the summary is a summary. Even an official heading is one: the Pennekamp rule’s own title says more than its first paragraph does.