The first Maine lobster verified off the Bay Area coast was caught by accident last week in a crab trap set by Sean Hodges of the sport fishing boat Hog Heaven. 
 
 After a photo to prove the event, Hodges released the lobster back to the sea. The lobster was found in a crab trap that had been set on the ocean floor 250 feet deep near the Farallon Islands. 
 
 The catch was first reported by longtime field scout Tim Goode, editor of NorCalFishingNews.com. 
 
 “It was a shock,” Hodges told Goode. “No other crabs in the trap. It had to weigh eight pounds.” 
 
 Sportfishing boats from Bay Area harbors are now offering crab-combo trips where they set crab pots and also fish for rockfish on the same trip. 
 
 “I have seen lobster off the Cement Ship at Aptos,” said Giancarlo Thomae, a naturalist and marine biologist in Monterey Bay. “I think people buy them alive at a restaurant aquarium, feel sorry for them and let them go. My bet is somebody bought it at Chinese restaurant in San Francisco and then let it go and it made its way out to the Farallon Islands. 
 
 “There are so few of them that unless they are grouped in one place, they won’t be able to find each other to breed.” 
 
 In El Nino years, spiny lobsters from Southern California have occasionally been caught as far north as Santa Cruz. 
 
 Tom Stienstra is The San Francisco Chronicle’s outdoors writer. E-mail: tstienstra@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @StienstraTom 

 Sean Hodges, skipper of the Hog Heaven out of Sausalito, has been fishing crab for 18 years and this week saw something he’s never seen – a Maine lobster caught in one of his crab traps. 
 
 “It was a shock,” Hodges said. “No other crabs in the trap. It had to weigh eight pounds but one of its tentacles was missing. It had been in battles. 
 
 “Somebody had to have let it go,” Hodges said, though with that enormous claw it might have hitchhiked across the country. 
 
 “That claw was gigantic and the lobster was mean, too,” Hodges said. “It gripped on to the trap and it didn’t let go.” 
 
 Hodges was fishing near the Farallons and had his traps in 250 feet of water. The lobster was by itself in the trap. 
 
 Lobsters can live up to 60 years. The largest ever landed was 44.4 pounds. It takes six years for a lobster to reach one pound so the Farallon Island lobster was a middle-aged crustacean. 
 
 After taking photos, the lobster was returned to the sea. 
 
 Keywords: Lobster, , Dungeness crab, Farallon Islands
– A fishing boat out of Sausalito, Calif., caught a creature a long way from home in one of its crab traps—a Maine lobster, reports NorCalFishingNews.com. The 8-pounder turned up near the Farallon Islands, thus becoming the first Maine lobster ever spotted off the Bay Area coast, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. "My bet is somebody bought it at Chinese restaurant in San Francisco and then let it go," says a marine biologist. The good news is that the fishermen set the lobster free after taking photos. The bad news is that he's up against some seriously bad odds of finding a mate.