Winter Spearing

After a stellar day diving with my daughter on Saturday, and the continued amazing weather (80 degrees), I called up Discovery Diving on a whim on Monday and found out there was a boat going out the next morning. I emailed Captain Leroy and he said he'd be able to drop me on a decent ledge between wreck dives so I could try for some fish.

Since the 'burban is acting up with the transmission, I dusted off the RX7 and drove down way early Tuesday morning. I was early and just hung around waiting for others to show (and took a nap). The others got there eventually and I grabbed some HP100s from the shop and we loaded up. I have ended up on the boat with some very cool people lately. I guess these cold(er)-weather divers are a lot more cool than the typical underwater tourists, because I've really enjoyed meeting them. The guys on the boat this time were three guys from Winston- a 20-something couple and a guy a little older than me. Considering we were all taking off mid-week to dive, there had to be a story- mine is that I have too much vacation left and had to burn it anyway. The guy of the couple was in a rock band, and his gf was in school. The third guy was a DOD employee trying to get some diving in before going back to Afghanistan and doing drug interdiction flights. He had flown his own plane down to Beaufort- and has invited me for future flights when he gets back- how cool is that?!

Our first dive is the U-352, a German U-Boat that was sunk by the coast guard. Those were some hard-core sailors in those days- that thing is tiny. Which meant that I didn't have a lot of opportunity to get fish because there's just not a lot of structure. There were some fat grouper about 20' off the sub, but no chance to get near them. There were also some big sand tiger sharks hanging out, of which we got a few pictures. I found out later that the secret is that in the bow, there are holes where the big grouper hang out. Next time.

Leroy dropped me off on a deep ledge that had a good show. I was hoping for some lobster to put in the freezer. The dive was looking like a bust- I burned a lot of air at 120' for 15 mins, with only small fish around.

On my lap back down the ledge I saw a decent triggerfish (he's featured in my post on trigger cleaning) and stoned him cold. I really didn't want that- I wanted a bit of a twitch to maybe bring out some more fish. The AJs (we don't eat them here) went crazy though and got the other fish interested. I was headed back to the anchor line and saw Mr. Hog. Sweet! I was pretty far off the bottom to save air, so I took a shot from too far up, I hit him, but it wasn't good at all. He goes beserk, and an 11#+ fish can move. But the jacks were my friends and they followed him to where he holed up, and I followed them. Then came a dilemma- a huge grouper comes out and is checking me and the fuss around the hog out. I had my second shaft loaded- but what to do - the hog was not dead, and I had plenty of grouper already in the freezer. I really wish Steff was with me because she's hit that big grouper while I dealt with the hog. "A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush" went through my head so I decided to put the second shaft into the hogfish. Well, he's not moving anymore- and I string him up- and I see two more big grouper come out... but my spear won't come out! I've got the big hogfish stuck to the end of my speargun and am running out of air. I switch over to my pony tank while I mess with it for a while, but no luck. I'm going to have to come back to the boat with a fish stuck to my gun, leaving some big boys behind.

I get back to the boat to find an 11# hog to go with my triggerfish and a mackerel we caught while trolling. A decent mix for sure!

I sit out while the rest of them drop in on the Spar. I'm kind of glad I didn't stick with them- they came up scared. Said they got swarmed by sharks, which started bumping into them. No chance for fish that drop for sure.

We get back to the dock and I drive Jeff to his very nice plane for him to fly home. That's a cool way to go. When he gets back in-country, we'll see about taking some trips!