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Written by: Bob Diaz
Category: SpearBlog 2007
Mon9Jul2007

July 7-8, 2007

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Bob Diaz | SpearBlog 2007 | July 09, 2007 | Print

Winds: SE 5
Seas: 1-2 ft
Surf Temp: 84 F
Viz: 40+ ft
This weekend was absolutely incredible for diving! As we headed out Saturday morning, we were running over areas that we can never recall being as clear as they were this day. There were times when the water actually seemed to sparkle.

Driving down Friday night, I noticed the horizon was dotted with the anchor lights of dozens of night fisherman. The general area and proximity led me to believe that they were all bottom fishing for mangroves in about 60-70 feet of water.  With the dark new moon sky and the calm weather, they probably didn't have any problem at all catching their limits of what were most likely very good sized mangroves. It would appear the spawning has officially begun!

 

We headed out Saturday morning to one of our "old faithful" mangrove spots. We have been working this area for about 7 years now and it has never failed to produce both good numbers and size of mangroves, once the spawning begins. When we got there at about 10:30am, two of us jumped in to check it out. There were thousands of snappers at this spot, all of them very decently sized (1-3 lbs) with the random heifer (3-4 lbs) in and among the masses.

There were 7 of us on the boat this morning, so our limit was set at 35. To our astonishment we bagged the 35 mangoes in about 45 minutes. We double checked the count to make sure we hadn't made a mistake and subsequently were off within an hour of arriving at the spot with our catch! We stopped at 3 other locations on the way in looking for other quarry (grouper, mutton and hogfish) and were able to bag a few hogs for dinner too!

We made a second trip out later that afternoon to look for more grouper and found the water clarity to be astounding in 35-40 feet as well. We were lucky enough to bag a couple more blacks, but the thought that remained with us throughout the day and the dinner discussion was that of the overall clarity of the water. None of us could remember it being so clear in such a wide area as we had seen earlier that day.

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