Getting Cold

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on December 18, 2010 at 4:28 pm {one comment}

20101211_snappershogs_2834 Haven’t been posting reports on here recently because the days when Catherine have off have not all corresponded to days where she could go out in the boat. I am more into posting photos on here then writing stuff. I have gone out a couple times and did pretty well but nothing outstanding. I am not as into taking pictures of fish out of the water as I used to be. Only if the fish is big does it seem to warrant taking a photo out of the water and nothing I have shot recently has been big, whereas a photo of a barely legal red about to be shot under water is worth taking.

The water has cooled and fish are everywhere.  The couple times I have been out we shot our limit of black grouper, sometimes our limit of reds as well.  All the grouper have been less than 20#, so nothing that special. The water has cooled to the low 70s and all my old  spots are covered with fish. Big rocks that had nothing in the summer, have schools of yellow jacks, yellow tails, and black grouper on them now. It has been very interesting to me paying attention to the fish and bait movements due to temperature changes.   The wind and vis have been the biggest obstacles to getting fish, because it seems like every rock on the reef has fish on it.

I saw the biggest kingfish ever the other day.  I had just jumped in and my gun was not even loaded. The thing looked like a log in the water, like it had reached a certain length and just started growing thicker.  Nurse sharks are clumping up all over reef, perhaps it is mating time for them. Also turtles seem very inquisitive, possibly mating time for them as well.

During the recent cold snap, I switched to diving in the 5mm farmer johns under my 3mm top. So much warmer but such a pain in the ass to dive in. Wearing all that weight takes some getting used to. I don’t really feel comfortable diving past 50 feet because the wetsuit compresses so much that I start sinking like a stone. I also feel like I am spooking fish more.  It seems like I splash more diving even though  I think I am weighted properly. On the plus side I dive right in on that inshore 68 degree water and feel great.  Once the air warms up a bit I am going to switch back to the 3mm pants.

Black Grouper everywhere

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on January 24, 2010 at 4:06 pm {one comment}

dog-snapper There are black grouper everywhere and the season is closed. I saw more black grouper in the past couple days then I think I have ever seen, and bigger too. And on top of that I still have not put a wahoo in the boat.

Went out two days ago with Brandon, Andy, Gabe, and JB . We went and looked at some gulf wrecks. The wrecks were covered with cobia but the vis was about 5 feet. Brandon and I tried spearing it but the terrible vis along with the monstrous bull shark that swam up to us in the murk was too much: we didn’t swim it for too long. After they caught their limit on the cobia on hook and line we headed out to the reef. There was over 100 feet of visibility on the reef. We saw wahoo and yet again did not get any in the boat. It’s starting to get kind of Captain Ahab-ish with wahoo. The vis was beautiful and although many of the areas we were drifting were kind of deep I had fun doing practicing diving to keep warm. I shot a nice dog snapper in around 60 feet of water and then we came in.

The wahoo thing is getting a bit frustrating.  The only thing I have learned new this past time was that I should swap the 250# mono I use for hunting the reef with 300-400# mono for rigging the gun.

The next day I went out again,  this time with Catherine, Jason, Nate, Corey and Paul. We headed out to the wahoo zone again, and again were skunked on the wahoo. Supposedly they were deeper that day. The vis was still awesome and I did a lot of 70 foot dives(as deep as my float line would allow), I am going to have to get a longer float line for going diving with Corey and Paul. Once we were discouraged with the wahoo we hit the reef in around 50 feet of water. We hit one ledge that had a school of yellowtail on it, some of the biggest yellowtail I have ever seen. There had be to some pushing 8-9 pounds, they were the size of yellowjacks and would not let anyone get near them. Under the yellowtail we counted around 6 legal grouper, one of which was over 30#, and two were over 20#. The big one knew to take off when he saw us, but I almost got close enough to poke a 20# one with my spear tip. It’s like they know the season is closed. We shot mangrove and mutton snapper, yellowjacks, triggerfish and cero mackerel, and had to pass on grouper after grouper.  We then came in shallower but the vis kind of sucked.

black-grouper-spearfishing I have been diving much better the last few months, for a while I was getting kind of frustrated with my diving.  My body could dive way deeper then I could equalize. After doing a few dives around 70 feet my ears would start squeaking and then over the course of the day I would have to dive shallower and shallower often having to quit early because of inability to keep equalizing.  Then I started taking nasal spray and this fixed problem instantly. I could dive whatever depth all day long. I noticed that even when I could equalize before the effort involved was cutting a lot out of my dive time, but now I was diving deeper and a lot longer.

The nasal spray is nasty stuff though and as much as I think you can get away with it once a week or whatever I tried to look for an alternative. My issues were not with mucus in my passages apparently, sudafed, mucinex, not drinking milk(I kind of think that’s an old wives tale anyway) did not seem to help at all. My problem seems to be with inflammation and swelling, which is why the nasal spray helped so much. So the last couple dives I have been taking gel coated aleve the night before and in the morning.  It’s an anti-inflammatory, and I have been able to dive all day with no nasal spray.  I guess I should not take anything next time to test if it’s the aleve that is helping but since it doesn’t have the negative side effects of the nasal spray, there really isn’t a reason to not take one.