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...
Winds: 5-15 South Seas: 3-4 feet Surf Temp: 84 F Viz: 20-35 feet This weekend we finally started to find some cleaner water without having to go too far offshore. For the past few weeks, the real clean water was unfortunately a little deeper than we...
Type:
Article
Author:
Bob Diaz
Category:
SpearBlog 2006
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Gallery Spotlight
June 4-7, 2015 - Andros Trip (a.k.a. Jurassic Park)
We setup our cleaning station at the abandoned naval installation. Check out the blog
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.
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.
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...
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...
{sigplus link=goprohero2 index=1} {/sigplus}I finally jumped on the HD bandwagon and bought myself a Hero2 HD digital camera by GoPro. These little beauties have been around for quite a while now so hearing about them isn't exactly news. But since I finally got around to purchasing one for myself and it happens to be that the Hero2 is the biggest leap in performance that they've given these cameras since their launch, I figured I would put in my 2 cents worth.
I realized recently that I had overlooked the fact that I had purchased and used some new SpearGear at the beginning of the Summer of 2011 and hadn't gotten around to posting about it (here or in SpearGear). This article is going to be one that definitely crosses over between SpearViews and SpearGear because of the fact that I do own it but I definitely think it's worthy of a review as well. In the end, SpearViews won the coin toss deciding where I would put the article (especially after I...
Seas: 2-4 feet (very sloppy) Winds: 15-25 Variable Temp: 86 F Viz: 50-60 feet We arrived Friday night to high winds and stormy skies and were worried that the weekend was getting off to a very rocky start. Unfortunately waking up the next morning to more of the same didn't exactly give us a lot of hope. We waited around most of the morning to see if the storms would finally clear up but it seemed as though the winds kept swirling with every storm front and kept the storms hanging around for a...
Winds: 5-10 variable Seas: 1-2 feet Surf Temp: +/- 80F Viz: 15-25 feet T his weekend the water was fairly clean in spite of the fact that we had a whole bunch of rain during the week. Too much fresh water usually clouds the viz and makes the water cool (it did do that). We missed high tide by about 1 1/2 hours on Saturday morning, but were able to swim right through to low tide by moving around so the current didn't affect us as much as it could in the wrong spots. We really racked up the...
Winds were 2-5 out of the East. Seas were for all intents and purposes flat. Unfortunately, in the area of Marathon and Big Pine Keys, the water was extremely dirty. Actually, it looked to me like an algae bloom. The temperatures have been inordinately high lately and with a little bit of rain, these things can happen. In depths as shallow as 25 feet, the bottom was nearly unidentifiable. You could still spearfish, you just had to use a lot more bottom time just in the hunt. You also had to...
Seas: 2-3' Winds: SSW 10-15 Viz: 25-40' Temp: 82F After yet another weekend with a minimal breakdown on the boat (just remember, BOAT= B reak O ut A nother T housand), I head down this weekend trying really hard to remember why I do this. After all, the past few weeks have been nothing but breakdowns, bad weather and bad seas with only a couple of bright spots along the way As a matter of fact, I mentioned the fact that it had been a few weeks without any really mentionable fish for me to my...
Winds: S 5 Seas: 1-2 ft Surf Temp: 86 F Viz: 35-40 ft Saturday was not a good day... I mean, the weather was fine but I just wasn't having a good day. We went back to a spot we had found the week before in about 40-42 feet of water. Last week the viz was absolutely incredible, but unfortunately so was the current. We were fighting what felt to me like a 2-3 knot current. It was an incredible amount of work just to stay put. We spotted about a 10-12 lb mutton but the second I broke the surface...
Seas: 3-5' Winds: 15-25 SE Viz: 10-15 Temp: 86F This week I was hoping for something a little extra. At the start of this weekend I hadn't shot a grouper yet all summer and I was hoping I would get the first one in spite of the fact that the weather forecast was pretty horrible and I was only going to get to dive Saturday because we had to get back home early this weekend to make it in time for a friend's daughter's birthday. So with little time and an unfavorable forecast, I was going to see...
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