Sunday last dive. We did 2 drops
Friday, 5 drops Saturday, and one drop Sunday morning. I’ve got one drop
to go and I’m strapping on a 120 LP jacked to 4000 (and beyond). These
dives usually turn out to be extended tropical fish excursions.
AJ, Speargun and I drop down the jugline onto a bottom of random gumbo
(the most gumbo we saw the entire trip). Figuring it for a soon to be
aborted bone dive, I put in my time and follow AJ waiting for his
patience to expire and the signal to ascend. I see AJ drop and shoot a
nice female hog. I figure that we just bought another 5 minutes in the
gumbo madness - there goes another 500 PSI. Next thing I know AJ is
emphatically mumbling through his regulator and madly gesturing forward.
As much as AJ and I dive together, I seldom understand what he is trying
to tell me underwater. I can however follow a pointed hand, so I blindly
kick it into high gear as AJ strings his hog. Up ahead, I see a nice gag
and I let one fly. My shaft finds the gag’s shoulder, and the gag and I
are off on a footrace (finrace?) with the gag winning. Eventually the
gag outruns the limitations of my visibility, but still I kick hard in
the direction of last sight. I catch a flash in the distance. A few
seconds later, I see my gag dancing with my shaft above a series of
about four adjacent coral heads. I focus on my gag despite the abundance
of gags, reds, mangos and hogs that are swarming all over and in and out
of the coral heads. I have found the nirvana that you only rarely see
and usually with about 600 PSI in your tank. I strung my gag as fast as
I could and looked up to see that AJ and Jeff had managed to follow me
in my maddened dash. It then turned into slay mode as the three of us
rained steel. The more we shot, the more fish came. The isolated
structure offered enough places to hide that the good fish didn’t bolt.
AJ and Jeff consumed their tanks, but for once in my life I found myself
in this situation with a full tank. I took full advantage of my 40
minutes of bottom time in 90 FSW finding myself having to unclip (from
my BC) and compact fish on my stringer just to fit another - and
another. I surfaced to a rather emphatic Jim Zurbrick taunting me with
"So how DOES this compare with South Carolina?" I didn't realize that he
read Spearboard so thoughly.
Prior to this dive, the boat had limited out on red grouper with the
exception of two fish that I had left in my limit. Saturday night, I
turned down many red grouper saying that I was going to shoot my own.
First dive Sunday morning I tore off a nice red, so I felt a bit under
the gun with what I knew was my last dive. It didn’t hurt that I filled
my two slots and could have added another red if I hadn’t limited out.
What a dive! Certainly one of my best stringers ever. Thank God that I
didn’t stone that first gag, or we would have never found those coral
heads that he lead us to.
Left to right: 4 mangos, 5 grouper, 1 red snapper, 1 hog and 1 grunt
that unluckily stuck his head out a hole that a mango had just swam
into.
