to see if we could jump in the water a little before actual high slack tide just to see if we could take advantage of some cleaner water. To our joy and surprise, we were able to jump in an hour before the slack tide and make way through a couple of...
any fish from the surface. We picked off a few more here and tried heading a little more west to see if the water would clean up, but it didn't. By now we've traveled about 13-14 miles so we decided to cut our losses and head back east to some shallower...
out Saturday for a late morning patch reef dive so we could kill time until the 4:30p high slack tide, hoping it would be clean. We headed to a spot that had been productive recently in about 30 feet of water. Upon getting there we found minimal viz and...
Mackerel at the end. We also had one last bit of excitement this weekend while we were finishing up all the dirty work of cleaning fish and picking up the site before leaving. We usually leave a rod in the water while we are cleaning fish since there...
(if I do say so myself :) and we had the headliner fish of the day in the cooler. Obviously the rest of the day was spent cleaning fish, socializing (this is what you call drinking when you want it to be socially acceptable) and cooking later that...
perfect it was. We had mild winds and seas and luckily those winds laid down early enough in the week so as to let the water clean up. We started out a little early this weekend to try and beat the holiday traffic. A couple of friends had reported to me...
little unloading and setup for our first full weekend before hitting the sack around 3am. I was up early anyway and started cleaning up and laying out some of the items that we stored all winter in the RV's storage compartments. My brother-in-law rolled...
water. We made it as far as Haulover cut and decided to get in the water. I rigged up and jumped in. The water was fairly clean and I started to see some limited life so I followed some smaller fish around looking for some decent spots that may hold...
got everyone on the boat we headed out just about 11:00a so I headed for some of the closer spots that would hopefully be clean at high tide. I got to the first spot only to find there wasn't much other than some small hogs wandering around. So after...
but I sure wish I could have dove that morning high tide. I can't help but think that the water would have been somewhat cleaner (besides, I prefer fishing high tides anyway). The one fish there seems to be an ample supply of this summer is the hogfish....
year. We did prevail however and got all setup with a little time left for a dive on Saturday. We headed out looking for clean water because we knew that we had missed the tide. Things didn't look too promising at first, but as we headed further...
we get to start out a new year of diving and spearfishing! We had been waiting for a few days of calm winds for the water to clean up. We had been putting up with 20-25 mph winds and dirty water for almost 2 weeks until last week. We headed out just...
deserved (overdue) servicing time during this past off-season. And even though my guns look great now, I sure hope I haven't cleaned the fish-mojo out of them :)! What can I say, the only person more superstitious than a sports fan (that I am), is a...
out and around you, the viz was probably 60-70 feet. But when looking down, you could see a clear division between the clean blue water and the silty green water below. It was interesting to move from 60-70 feet of viz at the top down to 6-7 feet of viz...
too much. Unfortunately we weren't seeing the same size mangroves that we were running into last weekend. That, and upon cleaning our catch from the first day, we noticed that a lot of the fish were no longer carrying roe. As long as they are spawning,...
to show for it after going 32 miles offshore. 1100 feet deep and not a single dolphin to jump in on. The sad part was how clean the reef was as we passed over it on our way offshore. We passed over some reefs in about 30-40 feet of water and I swear I...
is that the best day of the past few weekends has been Sunday and in efforts to take full advantage, we end up rushing to clean fish and just don't have time to stop and take pics. We didn't really slaughter them this weekend, but we did have some...
to slap you broadside as they were to come right at you. After a short jaunt, we decided that without any guarantee of clean water offshore, it was not going to be worth the punishment. Oh, well time to fix everything that's broken on the boat...
the surface of the water, she clouded up the hole! After verifying we thought it was legal, we kept waiting for the hole to clean up, but the current was really starting to kick up. I finally decided to take a blind shot in the hole, and BAM! I got her!...
I'm not going to lie to you, I got a little lazy and didn't track any of my weather stats this weekend. Diving, cleaning fish and cooking start to take their toll on you and you get to the point where all you want to do is get some sleep instead of...
Type:
Article
Author:
Bob Diaz
Category:
SpearBlog 2006
Results 81 - 100 of 109
Gallery Spotlight
May 1, 2025 - A late start to the spearinglife this year...
So hard to believe this was my first dive of the year. No springtime AP's this year, but at least we opened the season with our limit (as meager as that may be...)! We weathered big seas, wind and plenty of current for 6 hours to close the day with our black grouper bag limit. Hopefully it's the start of a great spearinglife Summer for 2025!
May 1, 2025 - A late start to the spearinglife this year...
So hard to believe this was my first dive of the year. No springtime AP's this year, but at least we opened the season with our limit (as meager as that may be...)! We weathered big seas, wind and plenty of current for 6 hours to close the day with our black grouper bag limit. Hopefully it's the start of a great spearinglife Summer for 2025!
May 1, 2025 - A late start to the spearinglife this year...
So hard to believe this was my first dive of the year. No springtime AP's this year, but at least we opened the season with our limit (as meager as that may be...)! We weathered big seas, wind and plenty of current for 6 hours to close the day with our black grouper bag limit. Hopefully it's the start of a great spearinglife Summer for 2025!
Over the weekend of March 27 th & 28 th I took the Level 1 Freediving course offered by FII (Freediving Instructors International) at their Headquarters in Pompano Beach FL. FII was started by Martin Stepanek, a multiple time freediving world record holder. The Level 1 curriculum is taught over a 2 day course. The first day is classroom and pool based and spans almost 9 hours. This course is designed for beginning freedivers and is supposed to get novice divers to a depth of 66 feet.
{sigplus link=oculusr5 index=1} {/sigplus}Hot on the heels of my review of the GoPro Hero2, I felt I would be remiss if I didn't follow up with a review of the case that resolves the one (and only one in my opinion) flaw in the Hero2 design, it's underwater focus (or lack thereof) flaw. You see, as I wrote about in the Hero2 review the curved lens on the stock case creates a focus fallacy when shooting underwater. It's fairly common knowledge now, so if you want to read about it, you can check...
The summer had been busier than I would have liked this year and I honestly hadn't had as many opportunities to post much less given much thought to writing a new SpearView, but after having time to really reconsider, I realized that I had actually had multiple opportunities to try out new equipment this year (not all of it successfully). Further to that point, when I took the PFI Freediver course back in March I had decided to invest in a new mask and ended up deciding on the Omer Zero Cubed...
This past weekend, I finally got to go to The Blue Wild dive expo. After 3 years of everybody telling me about it and not being around to get to go to it, the stars finally aligned and I was able to check it out. Unfortunately, it meant missing out on 5-10mph winds and less than 1' seas inside the reef, but there were other reasons I couldn't get out this weekend, so I figured I would take advantage to check it out and possibly win something from the raffle to boot (I won't keep you in...
It didn't take me long to finish rigging up the 120 with a new reel and 2.2mm dyneema line. Unfortunately as of now (Apr 2009), I haven't had an opportunity to get into the blue water to put this new toy through its paces. I am definitely jones'ing to give it a try! I am also working on making my own flashers for use in blue water. I have been watching these being used on a few spearfishing shows and their reasoning seems sound for their success. They didn't seem too hard to make, so I decided...
Believe it or not my latest addition to my spearguns is not one for shooting fish (well at least not shooting to kill them). But it hopefully will help others watch online what I love to do underwater. I have made a camera mount for my Riffe Euro guns. This mount will fit on any Euro that has the reel inserts (basically all of them). It was terribly simple to make. The only fairly tricky part was putting together the actual mount screw for the camera tripod mount itself.
Seas: 3-5 feet Winds: 20-25 S/SE Viz: 20 feet Temp: 81 F The forecast for the long weekend was promising, at least for Saturday. S-SE winds at 5-10 knots with seas 1' inside the reef and only 1-3' outside the reef, phehomenal. The outlook wasn't as great for Sunday and Monday, but we hoped one good day would be enough and besides, we usually get the hell outta Dodge early on holidays to beat the traffic so Monday didn't even really count, so we were hopeful as we pulled in Friday night and I...
Winds: 5-10 east (morning) 15-20 east (afternoon) Seas: 2-3 (morning) 3-4 (afternoon) Surf Temp: 77F Viz: 35 feet Trying to take advantage of a lull in the spring winds, we headed out at about 8:00am. The day looked like it was going to shape up nicely. The forecast had predicted 5-10 in the morning with 15-20 in the afternoon. The winds had laid down for a couple of days and we decided to see if it had allowed the local waters to clear up some. We headed out of Key Biscayne from the Bay into...
Winds: Variable direction (mostly northerly) 20-30 mph Seas: 1-3 near land and structures 3-5 inside the reef Surf Temp: +/- 78 F Viz: 10-25 feet Not exactly what I call ideal conditions, but you could get in the water. The water was chilly, for South Florida, anyway. You could acclimate to the water temperature, but after a while you needed a break. Viz was variable, depending on the tide, with low tides being the worst. It wasn't the typical rainy Memorial Day weekend by any stretch. The...
Well, this past weekend was supposed to signal in the start of my Summer with beautiful skies, calm winds, light seas and clean water. But as you should already have surmised from the lack of weather conditions at the top of this article (don't worry, I recorded them at the bottom), it didn't. I mean, I did get to take the day off from work and take a nice leisurely drive down to the keys with everything in tow. Unfortunately, that's where the fun started and ended. As I'm driving down and...
Winds: 5-10 SSE Seas: 1 foot Surf Temp: +/- 76F Viz: 25-35 feet After receiving a late Saturday afternoon call, and some frantic packing of all my stuff, I was waiting at the marina for my friends at 7:30am to do some more diving in Miami. We headed out of Matheson Hammock marina towards Fowey Light early enough to pass about a dozen boats making bait (what's that stuff used for again?). The seas were completely flat as far as the eye could see, and the best I have seen in Miami for quite some...
Winds: SE 5-10 Seas: 1-2 ft Surf Temp: 81 F Viz: 20-30 ft This weekend brought back our perennial foes the moon jellyfish. They moved in quickly over the past couple of weeks and moved in thick. In some spots we had trouble surfacing without almost colliding with a few of them on the way back to the surface. For the second weekend in a row, we found that same thermalcline that created a layer of extremely warm water at the bottom that also made it difficult to see near the bottom in depths...
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