Warm water cobia and lion’s mane jellfish

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on October 4, 2011 at 1:49 pm {no comments}

20110930_summer-cobia_2616 Got out this weekend with Cat, Nick, Katie and the stoner. We dove really really close to Key West and did ok. Well actually Nick scored a cobia which made the day. outside of the that we just got a bunch of little fish. We also got some lobsters. I dove a bunch of rocks in Hawk’s channel. There was tons of bait, lionfish and short groupers. I also saw a couple legal groupers but was not able to get them.

They jellyfish keep coming and going. They still are not as bad as they were but they are still definitely around. Inshore we saw a lot of lion’s mane jellyfish, one of which was eating a moon jelly fish. They appear to be gorging themselves on the moon jellies. Which is good, I guess.

I got a Wong reel to go on the new tiller spear gun Jason is making me. It appears to be identical to the Mako reel which sells for like $25 less.  So not only does Wong sell crappy shafts which turn to rust almost instantly, he sell’s basically marked up Mako stuff.

Slow days

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on September 28, 2011 at 5:55 pm {one comment}

lionsmane-jellyfish Well been out a couple times the past couple weeks but not a lot to report. Dove near Key West a couple times, and once to the east. I pretty much think that in the summer if you are going to dive close to Key West you just are not going to see that much fish. One day Cat and I went out and got stung by so many jellyfish I just lost my temper and drove home. It was like a horde or something out there, there was a million moon jellies but then there were other mutant jellyfish. We saw big lions mane jellyfish, eating the moon jellyfish I guess.  More disturbingly I saw box jellyfish, not sure what type of box jellyfish but these things looked scary. They were almost transparent and they responded to you, like they swim around, not mindlessly like other jellyfish.

Then I went out a day with Brain Lee, Andy and Jason. We dove all deep stuff all day, it was kind of entertaining watching Brian and Jason argue about when is the appropriate time to hit a spot using a scuba tank, vs continuing to free dive it.   I had an ok day shooting a couple muttons, some yellow jacks and some ceros. No one else really shot anything which was weird. I got to dive some deeper stuff to 75 feet, which I enjoy. I also saw the gun I lost the other day. It had growth on it.  I went to get it on the next dive but a mutton distracted me. Then Jason went down with a tank, and couldn’t find it.  I saw fish in the deeper water,  a nice cubera, a huge mutton, but no one else seemed to be seeing anything so we moved on.

We dove the Vandenberg a bit which made me wish I had brought my camera.  There were schools of hundreds of baby yellow jacks that would just envelope you on a dive.  I got a hog off the deck on the bow. That is close to 90 feet.

The next day Cat came out with us, we were supposed to go out to the blue water for dolphin and wahoo, then come in and take advantage of the lack of current and chum one of the wrecks out front. Instead we went to American Shoal which sucks, at least this time of year on a weekend.  Then we dove some patches in hawks channel which also kind of sucked but Cat was in heaven taking photos of the coral.  We shot next to nothing, no fish photos.

There has been a bunch of fish in the Gulf but with bad vis reports we didn’t head out there.  We probably couldn’t have done any worse though.

Great December Weather

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on December 28, 2010 at 1:01 pm {2 comments}

Went out yesterday with Lou, Juan, and Rafi.  Conditions were excellent, vis was 50 plus most of the day and the trash talk in Spanish was very plentiful. It was another day where I really wish Catherine had been there for photos.  We started by doing some drifts on the reef line, on one of the first drifts we came up on a rock covered in bait with a school of yellow jacks just going nuts around mid water column. On the top of the water two huge sailfish were working the bait. The sailfish swam right up to me and popped up their sails to corral the bait some more. I called to the boat for the camera but by the time it got there the sailfish were gone. Awesome sight, the Yellow jacks working with the sails to get the bait fish.  We popped a couple of the yellow jacks and moved on.

We checked one of the wrecks that had some big fish on it the other day. There were some fish, but not many really. The water was warmer, 72 degrees up from the 68 degrees and there were some fish but nothing major. I cut up a cero mackerel and had a school of amberjack surround me eating the pieces.  I shot one and Lou shot one, one to smoke and the other to use as chum. I followed a little black down onto the sand by the wreck but ran out of breath before I could get him. Lou strapped on a tank and went down and shot him. Since the bubbles from the scuba tanks seem to drive a lot of the fish away I grabbed the camera and took a couple photos.

After that we went back to the reef line. I jumped in on an area that was loaded with little fish. I didn’t see anything big but then Juan and Rafi dropped a bunch of amberjack chunks up current from me and everything started to go nuts. First fish I saw was a 3-4# mangrove which I shot and put on my float line. Then after 10 minutes, a nice black came in on the chunks.  I got down to within range but at the last second the fish started to to take off. I shot him anyway and let go of the gun for fear of him tearing the shaft out.  He ran around a hundred feet and then rocked up. Almost immediately there was a nurse shark trying to go in the hole.  I called for the boat and for Lou to get in with the tank before the nurse ate my fish. The rock wasn’t that deep, around 50 feet , with some work I probably would have gotten the fish out. But with the shark, better to just get the fish. As Lou was getting in, the nurse suddenly changed targets and grabbed the mangrove on my float line and would not let go. For like 5 minutes I had the tug of war with the shark, my gun lodged in a hole attached to a grouper and the nurse attached to my float line rolling around and going nuts. Finally the nurse let go after Lou poked him repeatedly and Lou was able to recover the grouper.

Then we went in to some live bottom to look for some reds and muttons. The water suddenly silted up and the temperature dropped but we did not really find that many fish. It was getting late at this point and we called it a day.  I brought the camera out even though it didn’t spend much time in the water. I am going to try to bring it more.

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