What Does a Good Red Grouper/Red Snapper Hole Look Like?

[John21:6]

Sonar images don’t give me a good understanding of what the bottom looks like or what makes a spot a good grouper or snapper hole. My attempt at a solution to this problem has been to lower an underwater action camera, a cheap one, to take some videos. Once you decide to lower a camera, the question becomes how can you keep the camera stable. A mount that is light will cause the camera to bounce around making you seasick as you watch the videos. A heavy mount will be stable but it might get stuck on the bottom—forever.

After four or five attempts at building an underwater tripod, I finally made something that works well. Here it is:


The tripod is made out of half-inch schedule 40 PVC pipe. The shape of the base was made possible by a 5-way PVC fitting that I found on Amazon. Because the base is about 10” in diameter, it fits snuggly into a 5-gallon bucket, which is a good place to store it on the boat. The weight is a concrete sprinkler donut that I found in my garage. The base connects to the vertical shaft with a threaded connector that allows me to separate the base from the rest of the tripod. At the top of the tripod is a piece of pool noodle from the dollar store. The pool noodle is intended to help keep the tripod upright on the bottom and to allow the tripod to float, one day, through a school of mahi-mahi with the base removed. I have a clip at the top of the tripod that I attach to the line on a stout grouper rod.

You can purchase a camera like mine on Amazon for about $40. It comes with a housing that is advertised to be waterproof to 40M or 131 ft. The camera also has a lot of options in terms of resolution from 720P to 4K and frames per second (FPS) of 30 to 120. However, the higher the resolution or FPS, the more time consuming it is to transfer a video from the camera to your phone over the camera’s WIFI. Additionally, the higher the FPS, the darker the images. What seems to work best is to set the camera to take 1-minute looping videos at 1080P and 30 FPS.

If someone wants to tell me how I can post a video on this site, I will gladly post a few of them. However, here a few still images from the videos. The stills below are from my most recent trip (see post titled Good Thing I Brought that Extra Fish Cooler). These stills show a gag grouper taking a bait and immediately trying to dive into a hole in the rocks and stirring up sediment as it fights to stay on the bottom. At the same time, a red snapper hits another bait and is pulled to the surface.















The red snapper was 22-24” in length. Here’s what the gag grouper looked like at the surface:



Thanks to instructions from doomtrpr_z71, here’s a link to the full 1 minute video:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wtlw50656kjw ... 3.mp4?dl=0


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[redcodefsu]

That's pretty cool

[John21:6]

That's pretty cool

Thank you for reading the post, and thanks for the feedback.

[illinoisfisherman]

Very cool idea.

[slow motion]

Very cool. Thanks for posting.

[FTReelty]

Always wanted to see that....Those dang grouper know how get in a hole!

[doomtrpr_z71]

Very cool, do you have a Dropbox or YouTube? You could post the videos on here that way by embedding the videos.

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[Red Beard]

That’s cool!

[rebel10]

One of the coolest things ive seen. Keep it up!

[doomtrpr_z71]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/wtl ... 3.mp4?dl=0

Use this link to watch the video, I'll embed it later



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[Red Beard]

Wild to see that grouper at the beginning try to slip under the rock.

[howl]

Neat! Name of camera?

[John21:6]

Neat! Name of camera?

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[tallykenj]

Too cool!!!!