7/29 St. Marks, marker 24 area

Pimpmassa · Post by **Pimpmassa** » July 30th, 2007, 2:15 pm

Me, and some good friends of mine went diving (with spears of course!) out of St Marks on Sunday the 29th. Left shields marina at 6:30 am to make a run to a beautiful diving and spearing spot in an area somewhere about 12 miles south of marker 24.

Depth is around 55 feet (max was 57 on my dive watch). Since the visibility has been decent as of late, we figured it would be nice to dive the kickass bottom there.

Got in the water about 9:30am, and the visibility was a whopping 5 feet... sucks... Even worse, the visibility that was there was really blurry, like i needed glasses.
We found some good bottom a looked for bull-dozers, but found none. diddnt pull the speargun trigger once since we couldn't see past the end of the gun.

We pulled anchor and went back towards marker 24, to find the ever-elusive barge. We had attempted to find it the week before, but never seemed to get to it. We splashed down to find pretty good visibility, 15 feet, especially since the depth there is only 30 feet or so. According to the published numbers and our GPS, we were within 50 feet. Got down to the bottom to find a bunch of culverts and rocks. it was a beautiful dive. pulled the trigger twice and got two big spanish mackerel. We surfaced after 50 minutes of looking for the barge.

We decided to look for the barge once again, and motored around for about 10 minutes watching the bottom machine. We hit something big and threw a marker buoy over. I free dove down and saw what was either a huge culvert or a barge. Free dove again, and confirmed it, whilst scaring the crap out of 3 Goliath grouper (lots of loud drumming!). We suited up and headed down the anchor rope.

The barge is much smaller than i expected it to be. it sits about 6 feet off the bottom, and is about 40 feet long and 30 feet wide. There were plenty of small mangroves all over it, as well as 3 big Golaiths and one small one. No grouper big enough to shoot there. Pulled the trigger once at a just large enough mangrove for hail marry target practice and missed.

the actual GPS point we now have for the barge is about 160 yards away from the published number (that is a guess).

--pimpmassa

Post by **SHOWBOAT** » July 30th, 2007, 2:23 pm

Welcome to the board and thanks for sharing. Always nice to hear what's actually going on down there.

Post by **Frank Bradfield** » July 30th, 2007, 4:05 pm

Interesting about the vis..Its seems kinda random , every drop is different, bad as 5 nothing better than 15. Weird it was better shallow than deeper ! Was the tide slack or incoming on the shallow dive ?

Post by **mjsigns** » July 30th, 2007, 5:04 pm

Good Report-

I have always wondered where that barge moved to after the big storm. Interesting

Post by **Boat_Full** » July 30th, 2007, 10:38 pm

Better luck with spearing next time. Any time in the water is better than not.

Pimpmassa · Post by **Pimpmassa** » July 31st, 2007, 1:12 pm

First dive was when the tide was at its lowest point. At the barge, it was later in the after noon and the tide was coming in and was ripping, about 1.5 knots.