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Mon20Jun2011

June 4-5, 2011 - The tiny son of a gun bit me!

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Bob Diaz | SpearBlog 2011 | June 20, 2011 | Print
Seas: 3-7 feet Winds: 20-25 E/SE Viz: 25 feet Temp: 81 F

There really isn't much to write about this weekend as it was yet another weekend spent holding or weighing down everything from the tablecloth to your plate once you had eaten more than half the food on it. As for the forecast this weekend, I'm not going to split hairs with the meteorologists. They forecast 15-20 E/SE and I'm reasonably sure the wind was considerably stronger than that (I honestly believe 20-25mph with frequent 30mph gusts), but at the end of the day it was a matter of sucking more or sucking less, so who really cares. I got reports from some other fishermen that there was about 25 feet of viz closer to the reef, but the trip wouldn't have been any fun and being tossed around like you're swimming in a washing machine wouldn't have been very entertaining either so we decided to keep it to a "fix everything that needs fixing" weekend. Unfortunately with boats and trailers, there's always something that can be fixed or looked at.

After spending most of the morning and early afternoon on my back making adjustments to the boat trailer, and helping others that were working on projects of their own around the island, we decided we had worked hard enough for the day and heeaded out to brave the wind and seas to take the families out to a sand bar and kill some time until dinner.

{sigplus/}Luckily the ride out was with trailing seas, so even in spite of the winds the ride wasn't too uncomfortable and we made great time heading out to the sand bar. Unfortunately for us, it was the wrong one... nothing that a few extra miles drive couldn't solve, so soon enough we were anchored up jumping overboard. After a good while on the sand bar we figured we should start making way back to the campground to get started on dinnner. Little did I know that I had a "small" adventure left.

As we were just getting underway I started putting away the anchor line. While I was doing that I noticed a pain building in my right thigh. At first I figured I had brushed up against something that was stinging me but it wasn't too bad so I just kept on reeling in line. All of a sudden the pain got really sharp and when I looked down at my leg, I saw what I first thought might have been a jellyfish or some other stinging animal attached. I instinctively slapped it off my leg. To my surprise, when it hit the deck, I realized it wasn't what I thought at all, but another ('another' referring to the first tiny octopus I caught on May 7 in Miami) tiny octopus that had somehow attached itself to my leg and started biting me with it's beak. The darn thing actually bit me hard enough to draw blood (maybe I should have paid more attention when I first felt it). I still don't know how he came to be attached to my leg, but I picked him up off the deck (not an easy task with all those tentacles) and put him in my daughter's critter catcher (formerly known as "The Bucket of Death") and took it back to the campground for some pictures.

Incredibly enough, this octopus was approximately the same size of the one I caught back in Miami on May 7. Just see for yourself...

 

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