Braedon Flynn got the text Friday from his friend Ryan Lawlor: Jumbo squid had invaded the waters off Newport Beach.Flynn, a Newport Beach native who had been around fishing all his life, had never encountered the oversized creatures. Lawlor, who'd tangled with them a few years ago off San Diego, promised to call Flynn if the squid ever made it to Newport Beach.
So Flynn and Lawlor grabbed fishing rods Saturday night and jumped on a private boat with a third buddy, trailing a commercial vessel that was using sonar to locate the squid population.
Flynn said he had one thing in mind: calamari steak. On moonlit waters two miles off the coast, the trio caught six Humboldt squid, each between 4 and 5 feet long. A commercial-market squid is about the size of a human hand.
"It was a good fight," Flynn, 28, said of his ink-stained prizes, now sitting chopped up in a freezer. "They're really heavy, they're going against you -- your rods are practically bent to the water."
The invasion of the jumbo squid in Orange County -- not to be confused with the exceedingly rare and much larger giant squid -- has prompted fishing-boat operators to add nighttime voyages.
The operators have reported that since Thursday evening, anglers have landed more than 1,000 of the squid.
"That is a very, very small sample of the amount of squid that is out there now," said Eddie Kisfaludy, a marine biology collector at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The creatures have been hanging around San Diego shores for more than a month.
Researchers say the squid inhabit the eastern Pacific Ocean, making appearances from Chile to as far north as Alaska. But their stops along the coastline have been much more common over the last decade, said William Gilly, professor of biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute first spotted the squid during the El Niño storms of the late 1980s.