Summer Sucks

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on July 20, 2011 at 12:57 am {no comments}

Been a while since I posted and frankly there hasn’t been a whole lot to post. The water around Key West is green; there is some type of algae bloom. The water is piss warm like 89 degrees in some spots. Most large fish are absent. There are about million mangroves all over place, along with schools of school master snappers.

I haven’t shot any real nice fish in a while. A couple muttons , a little red, a couple yjs. I have been trying to get something going and run far out west just to see something different but with the vis reports coming in have not really motivated me to get out. A couple days I went out to the vandenberg and practiced freediving.  I get bored kind of easily doing that, unless the vis is awesome which it hasn’t been.

I took some photos of Cat diving over the past couple weeks and am posting them up because frankly I haven’t shot any fish worth taking a photo of.

Oh yeah we went to the Busch wreck to dive it one day and as usual the vis on it was terrible. Did they research the area that they sank that in at all? I mean I have been to that wreck like 4 or 5 times now and every time the vis is terrible once you get down anywhere near the wreck.

I played around with some hdr effects on some of the photos, looks ok depending on the photo.

Green Water has moved in

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on May 10, 2011 at 11:56 am {no comments}

vandenberg_0021 Well there has been some pretty good diving the past couple weeks, but Catherine had to work most of the days so I don’t have a lot of photos. I recently purchased a gopro camera which is actually working out pretty well.  I figured it’s tiny and I can wear it on my head so it’s something I can bring out and use when Catherine is at work. It takes a little getting used to and you have to replace the lens it comes with with a flat lens but other then that it has been great. The stills from videos it takes are pretty weak compared to the photos we get with the e-pl1 but it’s better then nothing, and it also can ride with me deeper then Catherine can dive. The thing that is kind of cool about the stills from the gopro is that they are about as close to the fish being shot as you can get. The quality is on the level of a point and shoot and without raw the photos are pretty weak but I’ll post them anyway.

We had a great couple of days shooting huge trigger fish a couple weeks ago, big fish up to 12 pounds. Lou and Albie dove with me and we had a great time and great vis but no camera. We saw several huge kingfish, I shot a small one and have been eating smoked fish to the point of getting sick of it. I guess it’s better I didn’t get a big one. The one day we had muttons swimming up from 110 feet to eat chum we got a couple but saw many more. The current was ripping and diving dragging a float line was extremely difficult, it was hard to dive past 50 feet let alone follow the muttons down.  We saw so many grouper it was amazing.  On one spot I dive down and counted six legal sized blacks looking at me.

Then we had big winds and the grouper season opened and it seems like all the groupers near Key West vanished. It was so windy on the opening day that I chose to stay home and in retrospect that was probably a mistake. Once I finally got out there it was like they were all gone.

I went out the past couple days with Catherine, her days off finally fell on some calm weather. We went out to the vandenburg and hoped to do some chumming and see what happens but being a calm day on the weekend it was covered with dive boats all day. We decided to practice free diving a bit . The lack of current was fantastic but the water was pretty dirty once you got down near the wreck, which kind of took some of the fun out of it. Catherine had a blast diving to the wreck repeatedly. I took my gun on a couple dives and shot a yellow jack for dinner.  After that we came in to the reef and checked some spots, shot a couple more fish and came in.

The next day we ran a bit west to see if the water was clearer.  It was not, it may have been worse.  We drove a bit offshore and found some tiny dolphin on a weedline, Catherine swam with them for a little bit and took photos.  After that we looked around for some clear water for a bit and found none and called it a day.

Clear Warm water

Filed under Spearfishing Photos, Spearfishing Reports by on September 14, 2010 at 4:28 pm {3 comments}

20100910_60-day_0717 Went out diving a couple days this week, had a lot of fun. One day Catherine and I went out and practiced freediving on the wrecks out front. It was fun but we really didn’t see any fish; even the jewfish were missing. We came back in to the reef and I shot a black grouper and a mutton snapper. The water was clear with at least 60-70 feet of vis and around 85 degrees. Not a lot of fish but still a great way to spend the day.

Then one day I went out with Andy and his girlfriend Cally. We did some dives on the edge of the reef in 65-70 feet of water. I saw a couple nice groupers but couldn’t get them. We drifted in the shallows and I shot a 15# black grouper. He was just chilling in the sand in the middle of nowhere. I almost felt bad shooting him, I think he thought he was camouflaged.

We found a grassy garden in the shallows filled with conchs and hogfish, it was pretty neat. We also hit one spot where there must of have been 4-5 black grouper all in around 45 feet of water. We both took off chasing the larger ones of the group. We were then joined by a big nurse shark with a yj in tow, he surprised the hell out of me suddenly appearing at the tips of fins and then following me on my dives to look up in rocks. I poked him with my spear but he came right back. He kind of screwed up my dives but I already had a grouper so I really didn’t care. I wish I could have gotten a photo or video of how ridiculous this nurse shark was acting.

Both days we left around 9 and 10 am and were back around 5 pm. I think total amount of gas burned was around 25 maybe 30 gallons for two days. Pretty sweet really, dive in 70 foot vis 85 degree water and shoot enough grouper for a cookout and a bunch of dinners. People may get better bigger fish diving in the other places of the US, but it always seems to involve diving in cold and dirty water or driving really far, and sometimes both. I think I am going to stay right here personally.

Page 1 of 212»