posted by admin on Sep 30
I am laid up for a little bit and unable to dive, hopefully I will be back in the water in the next week or so. I am to the point now where I am almost stir crazy enough to break out the fishing poles. I had a few video clips from the past month or two but not really enough to do anything with. So I looked around my hard drive to see if there was anything I missed. Looking at some of the older videos I made I realized that I have learned a lot about video editing since I started. So I decided to take the stuff I liked the most out of the old clips, slap it with some new stuff, and some other old stuff that I never used and make something with it. So a lot of this has been posted before, but I am using it again but better edited. Thanks for watching, lets see how much bandwidth I we can burn up
Watch the Clip
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posted by admin on Sep 18
Catherine and I went out today, first time in a while just the two of us have gone out. We had big plans, I brought chum, lobster heads, flashers etc , in hopes of setting up a sick chum slick in like 60 feet of water. But when we got out to sand key there was about 15 feet of visibility. We debated for a while whether we should run east or west. For the hell of it we ran east, when finally got out to around the middle sambos there was 25, maybe 30 feet of cloudy green visibility. We jumped in on a patch reef in about 25 feet of water and I shot a red grouper and then shot a Spanish mackerel more for target practice.
I had recently re-rigged my rabitech apex and had not been happy with how it was shooting. I tied my bands a bit longer to take a little bit of pressure off my chest when loading it and was not really happy with the result. I took the measurements off the mako website( it lists a range of lengths), but in my opinion it’s better to stick with the lengths on the Rob Allen size chart. When I was rerigging the gun, I remembered I have a RA open muzzle laying around and a finned shaft just collecting dust in my closet, so I took the time to put the open muzzle on the a Rob Allen 130 which has also been sitting around in my closet. So I took out the Rob Allen with the open muzzle and the finned shaft today. I really like this setup, except for loading the gun without a butt. I love using a shaft where the line doesn’t connect to the rear of the shaft, and I like the rob allen open muzzle better than the rabitech open muzzle. If I could get an RA muzzle for the rabitech I would be in heaven.
Anyways, a couple days ago had a filling put on the right side of my mouth, and it seemed to cause my right ear to have a tiny ache. Diving amplified with ache considerably, and with the crap vis made it easy to head in early. We did stop to catch three lobsters for dinner, it took about half an hour to find 3 legals, and sort through 6 or 7 shorts. We also found the king of puffer fish.
The jellyfish were out but nothing like it has been the past couple weeks. The swim pants I got to replace the crappy evo lycra I was wearing are working out great. I got the pants here http://www.coolibar.com/03507.html , and they run a bit big for diving, like I seem to fit perfect into a medium. (I don’t think I have worn anything in size medium since 10th grade of high school). They seem to block the jelly fish larvae well, and are quick and easy to put on , and I also don’t look like I am in the viet cong wearing them.
posted by admin on Sep 13
Went out with Andy, Joe, Kevin and Andy’s girlfriend yesterday. Catherine is sick, so we have no photos. Brought the camera but took one shaking vid and no photos. Not sure why I can’t put the gun down and take pics but it appears to be a problem. Joe and Kevin shot video for an upcoming spearfishing show, so perhaps I can get some stills from them for this post.
We hit the Bar and then ran west the Marquesas, we really didn’t get a lot of fish. We shot a bunch of fish but nothing big, well one hog was big for here at 4#. We shot yellow jacks, trigger fish, permit, black grouper , mangrove snapper, hogfish and a school master snapper.
One thing that stands out is I think we found the goat fish spawning. There were thousands of them on top of this one rock, pretty much carpeting it. I tried to take a video but a bull shark pulled in right behind me. I tried to get video of him but frankly whenever I bump into sharks when I am on the bottom it pretty much kills my breath hold.
That is the other thing, I saw more sharks yesterday then most dives, pretty much every spot we hit we had sharks doing drive bys, mostly reef sharks but some others as well. One I think was a sandbar was swimming on the surface with a bunch of little bar jacks following him, came in to almost poking distance of me. Andy had a bull push up on him to the point where he was going to shoot it. Also Joe shot a big yellowjack off the back of a reef shark, which would have made good video but the camera was in the boat.
posted by admin on Sep 8
My Mom was visiting this past week, she can’t really spearfish but she likes to yellowtail, so we chased after the yellowtails. We had decent conditions for yellow tailing dirty water and light current and at few points we had a pretty good bite going but for the most part the tails where small. A couple of the places where I found large schools of yellowtails while spearfishing, did produce a lot of tails but they where only in 50 feet of water, and the tails were small. Not sure if this is mostly just because it’s the summer and the water is so warm or what. We had better sized yellowtails in 80-90 feet of water.
The day we had the best luck on the yellowtails we also had a festival of sharks around the boat. When we first hit the spot after the chum was only in a few minutes a huge school of chubs appeared behind the boat. I was about to pull anchor but behind the chubs I could see the yellowtails, so we stayed. Then after a few minutes three reef sharks showed up two were pretty good sized for reef sharks and the the third was a monster. We lost many yellowtail to the sharks, I put some baits out with wire and managed to bring one shark to the boat side, another straightened out a hook. That seemed to make them back off a bit on eating the yellowtails. There where so many sharks I could not put a grouper bait down. If I put a bait on the bottom it would either be immediately cut off, or I would get a 20 minute tug of war with a big nurse shark. I don’t know how many nurses are down there, but it wasn’t the same one each time because I would look for the hook from the last shark brought up and it would not be there. Towards the end of the day, we discovered that the water was dirty enough to catch the yellowtails on 20# line, which dramatically improved the odds of getting them in boat. We caught 17 tails that day along with some triggers and jacks.
We tried yellow tailing a couple more times with mixed results, I have to find some deeper spots for doing this in the summer. We also caught a bird one day but was able to release it unharmed. I mostly suck at hook and line fishing, and find it very frustrating compared to spearfishing, I should probably devote some time into learning to hook and line better , even if its just for when people visit.
