Well there has been some pretty good diving the past couple weeks, but Catherine had to work most of the days so I don’t have a lot of photos. I recently purchased a gopro camera which is actually working out pretty well. I figured it’s tiny and I can wear it on my head so it’s something I can bring out and use when Catherine is at work. It takes a little getting used to and you have to replace the lens it comes with with a flat lens but other then that it has been great. The stills from videos it takes are pretty weak compared to the photos we get with the e-pl1 but it’s better then nothing, and it also can ride with me deeper then Catherine can dive. The thing that is kind of cool about the stills from the gopro is that they are about as close to the fish being shot as you can get. The quality is on the level of a point and shoot and without raw the photos are pretty weak but I’ll post them anyway.
We had a great couple of days shooting huge trigger fish a couple weeks ago, big fish up to 12 pounds. Lou and Albie dove with me and we had a great time and great vis but no camera. We saw several huge kingfish, I shot a small one and have been eating smoked fish to the point of getting sick of it. I guess it’s better I didn’t get a big one. The one day we had muttons swimming up from 110 feet to eat chum we got a couple but saw many more. The current was ripping and diving dragging a float line was extremely difficult, it was hard to dive past 50 feet let alone follow the muttons down. We saw so many grouper it was amazing. On one spot I dive down and counted six legal sized blacks looking at me.
Then we had big winds and the grouper season opened and it seems like all the groupers near Key West vanished. It was so windy on the opening day that I chose to stay home and in retrospect that was probably a mistake. Once I finally got out there it was like they were all gone.
I went out the past couple days with Catherine, her days off finally fell on some calm weather. We went out to the vandenburg and hoped to do some chumming and see what happens but being a calm day on the weekend it was covered with dive boats all day. We decided to practice free diving a bit . The lack of current was fantastic but the water was pretty dirty once you got down near the wreck, which kind of took some of the fun out of it. Catherine had a blast diving to the wreck repeatedly. I took my gun on a couple dives and shot a yellow jack for dinner. After that we came in to the reef and checked some spots, shot a couple more fish and came in.
The next day we ran a bit west to see if the water was clearer. It was not, it may have been worse. We drove a bit offshore and found some tiny dolphin on a weedline, Catherine swam with them for a little bit and took photos. After that we looked around for some clear water for a bit and found none and called it a day.
