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The Caribbean Spiny Lobster season will close in:

Mon26May2008

May 24-26, 2008 (Memorial Day)

Information
Bob Diaz | SpearBlog 2008 | May 26, 2008 | Print

Winds: 5-10  SSE
Seas: 1-2 feet
Surf Temp: +/- 82F
Viz: 20-25 feet
The first full weekend of diving for the summer finally arrived and I was raring to go. We still had a little setup to do, but not enough to keep us from catching high tide. Unfortunately, while we were ready, the tide was not. The full moon (or waning full moon) was still wreaking havoc with the tide and its duration. We arrived at what we thought was the right time for the high tide only to end up swimming for an extra hour and a half or so before what could only marginally be described as a slack tide. The tide switched so quickly and suddenly that we had almost no rest in between and by the time we decided to call it a day, felt like our legs were numb.

 This is the time of year we usually find the big mangroves in relatively shallow water. They usually haven't headed out to the reefs to spawn just yet. Surprisingly we didn't find the larger ones on this day where we were looking. We came across a large number of decent size hogs and borderline groupers. Luckily a couple of them were more than borderline (as you can see in this weeks pics). All in all Saturday ended up very strong as we ended up with 3 reds and 3 blacks, with one weighing in at over 18lbs.

Sunday started out with a little work around the campground finishing up some necessary work for some of our creature comforts. After we finished with those items, we figured high tide would be around 3:30pm based on yesterday's slack, but we were worried the moon would still be messing with us, so we didn't take any chances. We headed out a couple of hours earlier and got to some of our spots by 1:00pm. Once again the moon had the last laugh as we ended up fighting the current for 2 and a half hours until the time we originally thought slack would be (Why do we even try?). Once again we saw numerous decent size hogs and large numbers of borderline groupers. But once again we were disappointed when it came to the mangroves. We did get a couple, but those were pretty much the only large ones we saw. I suppose next time we will be taking a look at some offshore reefs just to see if any of our larger mangroves have already started to move offshore to spawn as the water has started to warm up. Guess we won't know till we get there.

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