Octopus and cold water

Got out the other day again with Albie before he left to go back up to North Carolina. I went out with Lou, Rafi, and Catherine as well. We headed out to the drop off for wahoo but there was nothing out there, except green cold water. There was a bunch of charter boats out there but all they were doing was jib jabbing on the radio and talking about how they were going to take their clients to western to catch a barracuda.

We came in to the reef and it was freezing. Water temperatures were 66-69 degrees and the air was pretty much 63 degrees all day. Thank god it was calm. The reef was alive with fish, yellow and bar jacks everywhere. Medium sized mangroves to maybe 4#, cero and Spanish mackerel were also everywhere.  I shot my first octopus which was pretty interesting, it turned out to be very good to eat once it was cooked all day. Catherine was very excited by this and took tons of photos of it.

We tried diving inside the reef because the vis was actually pretty good inside, like 20-25 feet, but there were no fish, except for grouper. Grouper were all over the place, I think I could have shot at least 6 or 7 today. So after diving inside for awhile we came back out to the drop off and it was loaded with fish. I shot an African pompano.  I guess Albie was lining up on it but with the weak vis I didn’t see him. I yelled to him because there was a second one with it but he thought I wanted him to shoot it again. After that we headed in.  Everyone was freezing cold.