Been forever since I wrote a post on here, but have been meaning to put something up. As I dive more and more, my idea of a fish worth taking photos of gets larger and larger. So I seem to take less and less photos. Anyways Cat is working a lot on her new business and hasn’t been out recently with her underwater camera, so no underwater photos.
Anyways, after the past two trips close to Key West not being very good, Chad and I decided to run way west. We were hoping the water was clear, and for once it was. There was also light current, so pretty much we got hooked up on conditions finally. The water on the reef has been pretty crappy the past month or so. It will be clear for like a minute but then it changes back to green.
Even though the conditions were great, there weren’t anywhere near as many fish as you would think, for being as far out as we were. Luckily though we got some really big fish, which kind of saved the day. Chad and I both shot 48 pound black groupers. We weighed them and they were actually within .4 of pound of each other.
48# black 35 feet of water
Chad shot his inside a shallow rock, in like 35 feet of water and stoned it. I was not so fortunate.
We had come up to a rock and I saw a big red sneaking into a hole. I went down and stoned the fish, but the flopper or something got stuck on the inside of the hole, so I had to return to the surface and was trying to pull him out from the surface. While I was pulling him, I saw this huge black come out and look at him, and then go under a ledge. The red came loose and I was pulling him up and trying to get my gun loaded when I saw Chad dive on the same ledge. I figured he had it, when I heard his gun go off but he came up with a big hogfish. I tossed the red in the boat and was asking Chad if he saw the black and he said no, so I dove again and just saw a jewfish, but then a big hog swam in so I shot it.
Chad kept working down the ledge looking for the black, and this 25# king swam in and I shot it, which maybe was a mistake. I thought it was going to pull out and I had Chad shoot it a second time. Then this reef shark came in and tried to eat it, and I had to stick my gun in ts mouth to make it stop. Once we got that taken care of we both started looking for the black again.
Chad had been working east on the rocks and I started looking west. I got down on the sand in 65 feet under the rock and I saw something big move though a small hole. I came around the corner on the sand and saw the black in the middle of a sand cloud. I couldn’t aim, I just had to pull the trigger. The fish ran in the hole and to the east, and I could not stop it.
Tiger Shark
I called Chad over and we started trying to find the fish, in the huge dust cloud it stirred up. Chad found it to the west and called me over from where I thought it had gone. At this point we had two reef sharks, and huge jewfish, and a tiger shark all trying to get the grouper. I kept diving down and once I got to the hole I would turn and there would be a shark an arm’s length away and I would stop what I was doing and poke it away.
Chad got in the hole and shot it again, while I blocked the sharks from following him in. The tiger was a lot braver then the reef sharks and I had actually almost had to shoot him to make him back down. It kind of was not even that fun at that point, but we got the fish.
Here is a photo that makes the fish look really big, not sure why it looks so huge in this photo
