Baja Dreaming

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I recently went down to Turtle Bay with my sights on yellowtail. My dreams were brought to reality when I shot my first two yellows at 21 and 26 pounds. The yellowtail were pretty scarce, but we still got a few nice ones. I went down with two Team Riffe members, Michael and Jessie, who are great people to hangout with and great spearos. If any of you have watched Kieth Love's Spearfishing TV on iTunes, Michael is the first diver and Jessie is filming him. They took some epic photos so stay tuned for those, they are still in Mexico spearing tuna and I'll get those photos and some footage when they return. They are putting together a video, they just spent 14 months traveling Latin America spearfishing. Jessie is one hell of a speara, and as Jay Riffe put it "A hell of a lot better looking than Kelsey!"

Anyways, here is a little video I threw together to just toss at you guys. The yellowtail shot was my 26 pounder and took me for a little ride. I handled the line a little sloppy, but still got the job done.

Baja Dreaming on Vimeo

Davis

Quote from chris oak

Really cool vid and way to go on your first of many tails! Be really careful when you are fighting them on a reel with line like that though, if that fish was hot and a bit bigger he could've drowned you! Usually if I start to get wrapped up I'll try to untangle as I fight the fish, if you have a current you can throw the line towards it and keep it off of you. I also like floatlines for bigger fish since I'm less likely to get in death tangles, but that's just my opinion.

Congrats

Yea, I like floatlines too, but I had all my gear stretched out from the first fish, and the breakaway wouldn't work, so I went to the reel. I knew I was getting bad, especially at the end, but could feel the fish really start to tire, so I brought him in. I cleared the line away two or three times during the fight, but reel line is just too light..

The footage I have from my first is classic, it was almost a stone, and as my hands hit the shaft the pressure was relieved and he woke up in my hands. I held on, but it wasn't even close to pretty. I should have it mid December..

Quote from Bamz

Nice Vid Davis, Congrats on the fish! How's the hand healing?

Doing well, almost closed up now. Still have a big lump of something under the cut, possibly balled up muscle. Still hurts a little bit, but not nearly as bad as it was almost two weeks ago.

Quote from chris oak

That happens to me sometimes too, sometimes you can take a piece of thread or string and do a constrictor knot about midway of the breakaway bungee and use the now shorter portion to hold the line (my buddy showed me a great trick of doing that to all of our breakaways, you use the farther loop as your holding loop when you store the guns, and a shorter loop below that is stretched tighter for when you are getting your gun ready to shoot.

I'm trying to find some less stretch problematic bungee, Mori gave me a piece of some chemical resistant oring stuff and I've had good luck with that so far.

I've done that before, but all the rigging stretched close to 4". I used some new 3mm dyneema from Spearitco and that stuff really stretched.

Quote from spearstuff

BTW how did you bust up your hand Davis?

Pulling my knife, bungee caught it and snapped it back at me. Cut the first knuckle of my index finger to the bone, nicked the tendon on top and is about an inch long.

Quote from toptuna

Davis awesome vid. Jealous a ton. You had some awesome colors in the video. Was that with the new go pro?

Thanks. It was shot using a GoPro 960 with the Pursuit flat lens. I learn a little more each time. I should have gone handheld in the dock, but there was a possibility of big broomtails, so I made the sacrifice.

Quote from Bulit 7

Nice vid and great fish? Looked like crochet there at the end!LOL!

What was that structure there?

It was a loading dock for super tankers. There is a conveyor belt that feeds out to the ships and drops salt onto the decks. Incidentally, there was some piles of salt on the ocean bottom that was pretty cool looking. We got kicked out twice that day. They kept changing their minds as to we could dive it or not. It wasn't too clean though, on breath ups I would occasionally huff some fuel that was floating on the surface and that is not fun at all. (well maybe to some.)

I'll get some stills up a bit later, school work is killing me right now...

Getting some pictures of the trip little by little. Thought you'd all enjoy this gem....