Divers making the annual trek to the Keys missed Tampa's Ray Odor this year. He says he skipped the sport season out of fear the feds would be on the lookout for him. "It's illegal to remove lobster from an illegal habitat," he said wistfully last week, reached on his cell phone as he celebrated his 77th birthday with family.
For "illegal habitat" read: discarded bathtubs, drums and other "things like that" that Odor says he has dropped overboard into the waters west of Islamorada over the past 25 years to create richly populated lobster living quarters. They are now teeming with lobsters. But if he reaches out a hand for those lobsters, he risks embracing the long arm of the law.
Odor's fame has traveled by word of mouth and on South Florida radio stations with sympathetic DJs who replay his theme song every year at this time. Odor, you see, is behind the "Lobster Mobster" ditty written in a Key West jail in 1989, then recorded at a Clearwater studio. That's when he and a couple of buddies were caught in possession of 399 fine specimens of the Florida spiny lobster, harvested all in one day.
Three-hundred ninety-nine is a bit much, isn't it? Especially since the one-day limit per person is six.
"They couldn't take a joke," Odor says of being caught red-handed with the catch. "We did overstep our bounds a little bit."
After the Florida Marine Patrol (FMP) arrested him, "we got out. Then we went back down to court and thought we had a plea bargain and would be free the next day. That night they loaded us in a cage and a van and took us all the way to Key West. We got 40 days in the Key West Hilton."
Odor, known as "Poppa" in the Tampa diving community, put the time to good use, penning the lines:
"It's all about lobster, this story I tell/ I went to the Keys, to get some tail/ I took too many and landed in jail/ Down in the middle of Old Key West/ Monroe County Jail will serve you best … It's called sport season, they said to me/ The only sport is to the FMP/ So if you come down here, in search of lobster/ Don't become a Lobster Mobster/ You get too many, Florida Marine Patrol rings your bell …"
Born in Bradenton Beach, Odor took up diving after returning from World War II service. No one had yet invented scuba gear for the masses, so he and his brother rigged up makeshift oxygen equipment using welding tools and materials available to them from doing ship repair. They called it the Odorlung. Not long after, Odor and a friend opened The Tampa Skindiver on Gandy Boulevard, which for a time was Tampa's first and only dive shop.
These days Odor makes handcrafted spears, spear guns and fish stringers; for info, see his website www.spearfishing.cc.
Sad to say, he doesn't plan to do any lobstering this year. "Because of homeland security, they won't let anyone go within 300 feet of a canal or a bridge," he said. "And I can't go to my habitats, because they might be laying in wait, looking to arrest me."
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2004.
