No wahoo but some big blacks

Catherine, Brandon, Andy and I went out yesterday. We had big hopes for wahoo and went west looking for them. We hit a spot on the reef and shot some barracuda for chum. From right out of the gate I should have known it would not be my day when I missed two easy shots on barracuda, and notice shaft #1 had a nice bend in it. I switched shafts and shot a nice cero and a small cuda to add to the chum pile.

When we got out to the zone we found chalky water and west bound current, there was also no charter boats, so frankly it did not look good. We gave it a drift anyway and didn’t really see anything until towards the end of the drift we hit the reef. In around 80 feet of water Andy had a big mutton come up to check the flashers. We dropped anchor and started to cut up the chum. Catherine was diving and said she saw a jew fish. I thought about that, we were in 80 feet of water by a drop off , no big structure around that we knew of, I quickly dove to double check on the id of the jewfish. Once I was down around 50 feet I could see a huge black grouper swimming around eating barracuda chunks. I dropped as slow as I could but he was inching out of range, but not out of range of Andy. As he inched away from me he actually was moving toward Andy. Andy hit him with what looked like a great head shot, the grouper went under a small rock and bent the shaft 90 degrees and tore free.  What a loss, we rarely lose fish, and this was a terrible fish to lose but nothing could be done.

After that we chummed some more, Brandon did a drift with a tank and shot large grouper, a small grouper and a huge hog. Then Andy did a drift with a tank and shot another big grouper. I freedove the entire drift, doing 70-75 foot dives but couldn’t really find the fish. I had a lot of fun diving though, I don’t usually dive that deep so I had a good time anyway. After that we went in to the shallows and shot some hogs and caught a couple lobster.