More Terrible Vis

The vis is terrible, I guess it isn’t terrible further west at least that is what I hear.

Went out two days this week and both were pretty weak. Went out with Andy, Andrew and Rob one day. We were going to practice freediving out in the blue water. Andy is all stoked on freediving again because he just took the advanced PFI course.  I have never taken a freedive class, I doubt I will take it. It’s not that I am really good at freediving, the deepest I ever dove was 90 feet, which is shallow compared to depths some people dive in a class.  I just never dive with anyone who makes me wish I could dive deeper.  I pretty much always can dive as deep as anyone else wants to dive, so I never really feel like I am missing out or anything.

Anyways we hoped that there would be crystal clear water offshore, there wasn’t. In 650 feet of water there was like 60 feet of vis. Then we ran into a pallet which totally distracted me from practicing freediving. The pallet had some schoolie dolphin on it, a couple triple tail, hundreds of trigger and file fish, and 3 or 4 mini wahoo. I tried to shoot the baby wahoo but they were too spooky. We  hung out in this mass gathering of fish for an hour or 2, hoping something big would come in but nothing did. It would have been awesome if Cat was there for the photos. After a bit we headed to reef and it was pretty much undivable the water was so dirty.

Then yesterday I went out again with Alfonse, Artmedies and Cat. We headed to the gulf side. The first patches we hit the vis was ok , maybe 20 feet of vis with lots of algae in the water. To my surprise there was some fish on spot. We got a couple cero mackerels and a big mangrove. I actually saw 3 legal black groupers and about a dozen shorts. I could not get a shot on any of the groupers. The water was only 15 feet deep and with the vis, I was right on top of them before I saw them. I just couldn’t get the shot together. Plus that area I think had been really hit for mini-season. One of the blacks had a spear wound in his side that looked fresh.  There were big schools of bait and a school of crevelle jacks came in and surrounded us.

After that we made the mistake of leaving that area.  First we went out to some wrecks where the vis was terrible. Then we ran west for more terrible vis. Then we came home and stopped at kingfish shoals to grab a few hogs for dinner and called it a day.