Took advantage of the great visibility and reasonably calm conditions and went spear fishing yesterday near the Marquesas Keys. Five people went: Brad, Catherine, Mike, Chris and myself. My boat handled that many people reasonably well, and we had a great day, visibility ranged from 60-80 feet all day. In the morning the current was kind of cranking but the rest of the day it died down.
Catherine took some stills and videos, I feel bad because the vids are primarily of me. I probably need to tell other people that Cat will take pics and vids of anything you ask her to, but the odds of her just following you around trying to get shots are pretty slim. She is just as interested in taking pics of purple sea fans and tropicals as she is getting pics of people shooting.
Our original plan was to hit a deep water wreck and try to shoot some pelagic species. With my small boat and 15+ knot winds from the south it looked like it would be a bit rough. When we hit blue water before even leaving state waters, it pretty much sealed the deal and we hit the reef instead.
First spot we dropped on was absolutely alive with fish, and some of the healthiest coral I have seen while snorkeling down here. We picked up multiple snapper, grouper, jacks and a mackerel almost instantaneously. We had one shark steal a fish and a couple frisky nurse sharks. We pulled anchor and drifted the area a bit, picked up some more fish, then the vis started to decrease so we headed further offshore.
We drifted a bit in the deeper water and ran into a big ball of glass minnows, some bonito were attacking them but nothing else. The current had died down and we anchored and chummed a bit using lobster heads. We picked up some muttons and had a curious reef shark and nurse shark to entertain us.
Then we headed into some shallower rocks which were just full of fish. There was a school of big yellow jacks and amberjacks circling the rocks, some porpoises came in and spooked the fish for a second. We anchored and picked up some more fish. Then a big school of crevelle jacks came through extremely fast followed by 2 bull sharks and literally 20 or more nurse sharks. What I saw was a very large school of sharks. Only the front of the pack was clearly visible and the others behind were just silhouettes, but also huge. They were bulls out in front of the pack so naturally I thought a large school of bulls was headed our way, chasing after the jacks. It kind of made me want to s*#t my wetsuit. But as they got closer I saw it was just the two Bulls out front and all nurses behind them. The bulls zipped past and the nurses stuck around swarming on the rocks. Pretty amazing really. After that we were all pretty spent and headed in.
Ah Thanksgiving, special day to spend eating turkey with family. Catherine and I spent the morning working and went out on the water in the afternoon instead. For dinner we had grilled triggerfish and lobster instead of turkey.
We took some pics and some vids, I pulled something in my arm and had a lot of trouble loading my gun, so I grabbed the camera, which is probably why half the vids were unusable shaking pieces of crap. Not much fish killing mostly just sightseeing.
Beautiful day yesterday, 8-10 knot winds we headed out to where we saw the wahoo the other day and were going to drift with flashers hoping for another shot. The water visibility was probably about 30-60 feet the same as the other day but the green and blue water seem to be mixing. the vis is better further up on the reef then it was but off the edge its not quite as good as it was the other day. We didn’t see anything big so we went in shallower.
We caught some lobsters for our Thanksgiving meal and Catherine shot a decent yellowjack for sashimi. I think it’s probably her biggest fish yet outside of shooting barracudas.
I got a pic of a bonnet head on the reef. There isn’t anything in the pic to judge its size and if I cropped it a bit I could probably pass it off as hammerhead .
Catherine and I went out spearfishing yesterday afternoon. She didn’t get out of work until 11 , so we hit the water around noon. One of the awesome things about having a boat in the water, is you can jump in and be off without much prep. It makes you use the boat a lot more, at least in my case. Of course half the boats in my canal rarely if ever go out so apparently it doesn’t have that effect on everyone.
We headed out to the drop off and to our delight there was blue water past the edge. I guess not true crystal clear blue water but at least 50-65 of visibility. The only thing that kind of sucked was in some areas there were massive amounts of jelly fish, like so many small transparent jellies they would cut 5-10 feet off of the visibility.
First drop in I missed a 25-30# kingfish, not sure how I missed, I often shoot 12 inch Spanish Mackerel at similar distance. Oh well that’s fishing. We drifted around in water about 40-65 feet deep. I got two muttons in about 50 feet. We didn’t really get any action shots or video due to the fact the boat was moving too fast for us both to drop off it safely. When I shot one of the muttons I got so far from the boat it felt like an eternity swimming back to it. Cat was still attached so I was safe but still, it took a lot to make that swim.
We then ran into schools of triggers perhaps there had been people chumming earlier, I’m not really sure but there was all you could shoot. I shot four and then Catherine dropped the camera and shot one.
Other interesting things that happened was a small sharp nose shark rushing our flashers. Also again yesterday it amazed me at how small a hole or indent in a reef a decent sized grouper can fit in. I followed a black from spot to spot until I Iost him and two of the spots he hid in were tiny. I would never have thought to swim down and check such small crevices in the bottom.
Catherine also went a bit crazy taking pictures of jellyfish.
Catherine and I went out for a quick lobstering trip yesterday afternoon and it was freezing. I am from a cold climate and usually when people who live down here say it’s cold I usually laugh and go diving. This was really cold, like for the first time I said this too cold, this is not even fun anymore.
We went to check some inshore rocks, they are in shallow water , less then 12 feet. The shallow inshore water is way more affected by cold air temps then the deeper reef water. Taking a wild guess I would suspect its like 5-10 degrees colder in the shallows, but I am going to get a thermometer for next time.
Legal lobsters were scarce, we got a couple in a couple hours but had to weed through close to a dozen, just under the legal sized ones. It kind of funny how they move around, I checked a bunch of spots that had lobster a couple weeks ago and they where barren, and then a couple hundred yards away there were some rocks full of them. Catherine got a couple good pics and we got a couple lobster tails so it was ok trip for a couple hours and probably something like 2 gallons of gas burned.
Catherine had another chance to test out her new wet suit in very cold (at least for here) conditions. She recently got a custom fit suit from a Greek website, diveskin.net . Although the suit looked great it looked like the sizing was screwed up on the top, and that it would allow too much water in , but once we tested it Catherine was toasty warm and yesterday was actually fine in the water . She thinks the 5mm open cell suitis much warmer and much more comfortable to swim in then her 5mm scuba pro.
Had a half day of spearfishing today with Catherine, and it kind of sucked. The winds finally dropped down to a reasonable level for the first time in weeks, and there was like 10 feet of vis on the reef in front of Key West. The water was beautiful just a few days ago, and the winds where blowing from the south, and the gulf stream is supposed to only be 2 miles past Sand Key. There was some decent water on the bar but it was quickly fading with the tide. The water looked like it was getting clearer going west, but I didn’t have the gas to run west. I just figured since it was just cat and me we would just hit the drop off in front of Key West, so I didn’t fill up on gas (sometimes I need to make the same mistake a couple times, before it sinks in).
We drifted most of the day, I picked up a mutton snapper on the bottom in 50 feet of water, and large triggerfish. Saw one big king on the bottom in about 60 feet of water and couldn’t get close enough. We tried anchoring and chumming but there was a lot of current, and with the vis rapidly fading we called it early and came in.
I tired out my ebay flashers, they don’t work in a daisy chain, got to re-rig them. Even though they weren’t flashing really, a few cero mackerel came in to check them out. Also a couple file fish thought they were awesome, and at one point when we drifted into shallower water a school of mangroves followed them.
Went out spearfishing yesterday with Brain , winds ranged from 13-19 knots all the day and visibility ranged from a green 20 to a blue 60. The better vis started about mile north of the drop off.
I brought some chum and flashers to try to get another shot at a wahoo but the waves and current where just too much to deal with. We anchored a few places at the drop off but most just smoked ourselves out swimming in the current. We both saw a lot of short black grouper but not much else. Then we tried coming in to the main reef but the current was even worse there. So we started drifting, after being anchored drifting felt like a breath of fresh air.
We drifted for awhile over the shallow hard bottom. Not sure if the water isn’t cold enough yet but we didn’t see a lot desirable fish in the shallows. There are bigger hog fish in shallows now, bigger for here unfortunately is like 16 inches, we took a couple but even bigger hogfish here are pretty small and still kind of a pain to clean. There were a few muttons but mostly borderline or short.
At the edge of where the blue water turned green we ran into a decent black, Brian shot it in the head but the shaft didn’t hold. I watched it run up into a coral head, and had Brian jump in the boat to get the boat anchored. This whole process kind of turned into a mess, the area around the coral head was sand and the anchor wouldn’t hold , finally after a couple tries I got the anchor caught on one of the few rocks in the area. The coral head was almost totally dark inside so you had to basically lie down on the bottom and put your head under it and kind of shoot the gun from there. First try I hit the grouper but the shaft didn’t hold, like 6 or 7 dives later I got another shaft in him and got him out.
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