Freediving the Vandenberg

Yesterday, Catherine Brian, Mike and I went out did a little tour of the wrecks in front of Key West, free diving all of them. First stop was the Cayman Salvage, it is on 82-85 feet of water. The scuba divers on it where just leaving so we dove it with guns, there wasn’t a lot on it that we could see. The surface vis was good and we could see the wreck from the surface, also could see the large jewfish sitting next to it in the sand. The deck was around 70 feet down and we could see lots of small fish, there where permit but we were inside the 3 mile line so we didn’t spear any. We tried to get down to look under the wreck but due to depth and lack of vis on the bottom we gave up.

The next wreck we dove was the Vandenburg. It was just sunk last week so no fish really on it yet. Plus it is covered with head boats. There was no need to bring the guns. I honestly had a ton of fun snorkeling the wreck. Due to it being more offshore the vis was fantastic and the top structures are in 50-60 feet down and totally reachable freedivng. We were luck enough to not have any current and we spent a fairly long time just taking pictures.

The next stop was joe’s tug. The wreck was deserted so we brought our guns, there was tons of bait and yellow jacks. No one saw any good bottom fish, but close by there was good bottom and decent spearing. We hit some other spots along the reef line Brian picked up a king mackerel and black grouper. Mike shot a cero mackerel , hog fish and mahogany snapper. We had some turned on reef sharks come and try to steal fish. They were much more aggressive then most sharks we see, unfortunately I only got one on film and then my batteries died. I totally forgot I had a spare in boat, and after I remember the shark escapades where over.

We hit some shallow stuff on the reef and Catherine took pictures of the tarpon and corals. I shot zero fish, still have a lot of grouper and Aj left from last week.