Went diving in North Carolina my new home, and it is cold. I mean really cold. Air Temperature on land is below freezing. When we left in the morning there was ice all over the deck of the boat.Now I had both my camera and my video camera with me and got like two photos and couple videos. I don’t know what I was thinking. Still kicking myself, the camera just sat in the boat. I am going to make myself take some photos next trip even if Cat can’t go. I have been neglecting this website a bit, mostly because I don’t get any good photos unless Cat goes and she hasn’t been able to go out at all recently.
Anyways we left at 6 in morning and it was freezing on the ride out. the ride to frying pan shoals is around 30 miles or so. It felt like a long 30 miles. We jumped in on some rocks Albie said were loaded with fish last week but there wasn’t much on them. A couple sheepshead, and schools of amberjack was it. There were schools of Amberjacks everywhere by the way. I did not see the monster jacks like Albie had seen the week before but there were jacks everywhere, almost every dive.
We dove the actual tower and Albie got a grouper off it and we both both got a couple sheepshead. I stoned a 50# aj off the tower as well, that’s a big fish for the Keys but nothing for North Carolina. Albie said he saw jacks that were 60-70 pounds all over the week before, and I had hoped to shot one big jack bigger then anything I had gotten in the keys but it wasn’t happening. The water was also supposed to 69 degrees the week before but when we got to the tower it was a balmy 63 degrees. Frankly the idea to run up there was kind of out the blue and I wasn’t really prepared to for it. By the after noon I was freezing.
We ended up getting the boat limit on gags. Someone from NC was trying to tell Albie that the gags are same as blacks in terms of spookiness. They are so wrong, at least from what I saw. I could pretty much swim down and put the gun on the head of a gag at the shoal.
We dove a deeper ledge and I shot a around 35# king fish which spooled my reel and took me for a ride. I don’t know how it got off, I think maybe a shark bit it. There were a number of sandbar sharks hanging around, they didn’t take any fish but they wanted to.
On the way in we hit a shallow wreck that was loaded with sheepshead and black sea bass. Of course black sea bass were closed and we couldn’t take of them.
I did not see one hogfish all day.
I took a couple short video clips, not enough to really make a video with but I’ll post them on here anyway.
Yea. There aren’t the crazy schools of snapper like down in the keys. Certain spots have large mangroves (at least in jax), but nothing like the schools you see in the keys…well aside from the red snapper.
We were diving in 50 feet of water. It was kind of weird there was gags, aj, and sheepshead and that’s pretty much it, to shoot.
There was like no small snapper or anything.
Not bad for a short video. As far as the fish go…that’s essentially what Jax is like but not always quite as clear. How deep were you guys? 30 miles in Jax is about 100′. As far as the gags go, I hear they are skiddish in mid to south Florida…but they (along with just about every other fish) are pretty tame/dumb it seems the farther North you get.