A fisherman who captured a rare blue lobster off the coast of Northern Ireland has described it as the catch of a lifetime.

The odds of catching the rare creature has been estimated by marine biologists to be over 2,000,000/1.

Stuart Brown, 28, from Bangor, Co Down, said he could not believe his eyes when he pulled one of his lobster pots up onto the deck of his boat the Huntress last Friday.

‘We were sitting in about 50 to 60 feet of water and the fourth pot came up,’ he recalled.

‘I sort of saw it, but I think I thought, ‘it’s just a lobster’. You could hear the tail going.

Fisherman Stuart Brown captured a rare blue lobster off the coast of Belfast (Picture: PA)

The odds of catching the creature were over two million to one (Picture: PA)

‘I slid the pot down to the crew man who lifted it out and he made a comment: “That’s very blue”.

‘I looked at him and said: “Yeah, no problem”. But then I did look at it again and said: “That’s too blue”.

‘You would get lobsters out there that don’t look normal, they’d be a bit browner or redder, just something different with them, but nothing that extreme.

‘I looked up Google to see how rare it was, and it was one in a two million chance of catching it.’

The creature was found lying in the waters close to Blackhead Lighthouse, on the northern shores of Belfast Lough.

The experienced skipper, who has been fishing since the age of 11, said the bright blue lobster was just below the allowable size to keep, so, after taking some pictures of the rare crustacean, he had to release it back into the water.

‘I’ve never seen one – other fishermen I’ve spoken to who are a lot older than me, they said the same, that they haven’t seen any ever, so it’s a surprise to everybody that it’s come in on the east coast,’ he said.

‘It’s still out in the lough somewhere, swimming about as happy as can be. Hopefully if someone else does catch it, they’ll return it as well.’

Stuart has labelled the find the ‘catch of a lifetime’ (Picture: PA)

Mr Brown is a shareholder in Co Down seafood wholesaling business Seafresh, which sells crabs and lobsters throughout the UK and continental Europe.

He said the blue lobster has now been added to the list of ‘weird and wonderful things’ he has seen while out at sea.

‘You just never know what’s going to come up,’ he said.

‘Every day you go out and you could go a year or two years and the same thing comes up and you just carry on and then one random day just something completely different just lands on the deck and you just look at it and go: ‘What else is down there we don’t know yet, what else is still to come up?’

Yet despite its extreme rarity, blue lobster sightings are not unprecedented.

The last known blue lobster sighting was by Ricky Greenhowe, then 47, who spotted the creature in September 2021 while fishing off the coast of Aberdeen.

Prior to that, one was captured in the waters at Penzance, Cornwall, in April 2021 by Tom Lambourn.

In both cases, the fisherman returned the creature to the waters after catching it.

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Capt Stuart Brown has added it to his list of ‘weird and wonderful things’ seen at sea.