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Had my final checkout dive for certification on Saturday morning, and spent the rest of the weekend spearfishing.

We stayed on the One More Time all day Saturday, since the vis was pretty good, and it was fairly shallow. Good practice spot. Killed 8 sheepshead.

Sunday we hit the Yamaha first, did a dive, stoned an AJ. Was looking forward to an "AJ rodeo", but the killshot was fun all the same. Visability was lousy, so we surfaced with just the one AJ. On our surface interval we saw that the AJs were schooling right under the boat. My buddy Jon decided to freedive one, and about 5 minutes later we had another AJ in the box. After that, Sean (my dive instructor) and Jon both freedove and speared another one. That got us our limit, 3 AJs, 33" apiece.

After that we hit a number SW of O tower, Sean and Jon went down first. Visability was worse there than it was at the Yamaha. They killed one big red snapper and came back up.

We decided to try O tower, since I'd been told there were a lot of mangrove snapper on it. We freedove it a bit, killed a limit of mangroves, 14" and up, (all but one were over 16", biggest mangroves I've ever seen).

<edit>
Ok, no limit on mangrove. Thought the limit was 4 per person, turns out it's 5, with a 10 fish aggregate. Doh. We could have limited, but we stopped early. There's always next time.
</edit>

Beautiful weather and plentiful fish. Probably the best weekend I've ever had on the water.

Wil

Good job

Nice report Wil

Wil , that sounds like fun, I have been toying with the Idea of diving myself. Way to jump into open water diving. How close do you have to be to spear a fish? any cudas around the O tower?

Sea Fox wrote:Wil , that sounds like fun, I have been toying with the Idea of diving myself. Way to jump into open water diving. How close do you have to be to spear a fish? any cudas around the O tower?

The guys that did my certification are awesome and are doing monthly classes. The only thing that's expensive is the gear (and you can rent most of it until you decided whether it's for you or not).

The distance you can shoot depends on how good of a shot you are, and whether you can freeshaft (shoot without a shock cord on your shaft) or not, and the size speargun you use. The longest shot I've made so far was about 8 feet, but I'm not freeshafting (yet), and I was using a 42" gun. I'm looking at buying a 48" gun, and want to work my way up to freeshafting. The problem with freeshafting, though, is that if you don't get a kill shot, then you've just lost a $30+ spear.

Most of the fish I killed were within 4 feet of the tip of my spear when I shot.

There were a few cudas around the tower, but they're whimps. One started eyeballing the fish on my stringer while I was futzing around with my spear, but I ran him off.

Wil