Well been out a couple times the past couple weeks but not a lot to report. Dove near Key West a couple times, and once to the east. I pretty much think that in the summer if you are going to dive close to Key West you just are not going to see that much fish. One day Cat and I went out and got stung by so many jellyfish I just lost my temper and drove home. It was like a horde or something out there, there was a million moon jellies but then there were other mutant jellyfish. We saw big lions mane jellyfish, eating the moon jellyfish I guess. More disturbingly I saw box jellyfish, not sure what type of box jellyfish but these things looked scary. They were almost transparent and they responded to you, like they swim around, not mindlessly like other jellyfish.
Then I went out a day with Brain Lee, Andy and Jason. We dove all deep stuff all day, it was kind of entertaining watching Brian and Jason argue about when is the appropriate time to hit a spot using a scuba tank, vs continuing to free dive it. I had an ok day shooting a couple muttons, some yellow jacks and some ceros. No one else really shot anything which was weird. I got to dive some deeper stuff to 75 feet, which I enjoy. I also saw the gun I lost the other day. It had growth on it. I went to get it on the next dive but a mutton distracted me. Then Jason went down with a tank, and couldn’t find it. I saw fish in the deeper water, a nice cubera, a huge mutton, but no one else seemed to be seeing anything so we moved on.
We dove the Vandenberg a bit which made me wish I had brought my camera. There were schools of hundreds of baby yellow jacks that would just envelope you on a dive. I got a hog off the deck on the bow. That is close to 90 feet.
The next day Cat came out with us, we were supposed to go out to the blue water for dolphin and wahoo, then come in and take advantage of the lack of current and chum one of the wrecks out front. Instead we went to American Shoal which sucks, at least this time of year on a weekend. Then we dove some patches in hawks channel which also kind of sucked but Cat was in heaven taking photos of the coral. We shot next to nothing, no fish photos.
There has been a bunch of fish in the Gulf but with bad vis reports we didn’t head out there. We probably couldn’t have done any worse though.
The box jellyfish you saw was probably a sea wasp. They are the only ones we get here. They suck, but are not NEARLY as bad as the ones in the Pacific (from what I can remember from my marine invert zoology class). And it is super weird to see them actually swim after you.