Some more recent photos from our trips.
3m female Great Hammerhead cruises over turtle grass in the shallows off Key Biscyane, FL
A Blacknose Shark is released after a brief sampling and tagging procedure.
A Great Hammerhead shark is kept in the water while the team rapidly gets samples and attaches a tag before releasing.
A SAD (Shark Aggregating Device)
Frank! Good to see you are still getting out there buddy. I feel like I haven't seen you in forever.
Amazing pics.
Any concerns that the SAD will teach sharks to frequent an area looking for food ? Might not matter might train a toothy to look for food in a certain spot?
Frank! Good to see you are still getting out there buddy. I feel like I haven't seen you in forever.
Amazing pics.
Any concerns that the SAD will teach sharks to frequent an area looking for food ? Might not matter might train a toothy to look for food in a certain spot?
I know man! We gotta get out more this summer for sure.
What's funny about the SAD, is that we went out on a Friday, caught 4 species of sharks and then deployed the SAD for our Saturday trip. The SAD soaked all night and we went back the next day to fish the area and only caught 2 nurse sharks...so I can't really say that they were drawn in by the SAD. You think there would have been more with the SAD but that was not the case.
Maybe too long of a soak? When I was doing my crab traps the fish baits were all but gone after 12 hours and seemed to have lost most of their oil and such much sooner. Pigs ears and feet were always the best crab bait.
Perhaps the other species were around earlier and took off
Maybe too long of a soak? When I was doing my crab traps the fish baits were all but gone after 12 hours and seemed to have lost most of their oil and such much sooner. Pigs ears and feet were always the best crab bait.
Perhaps the other species were around earlier and took off
That's very possible. So much we don't know about their behavior when we think we do. It's been an exciting experience for sure!
Me and the boys got out today to do a little spearing off Elliot on what is arguably my new favorite section of reef in the area. While finding dinner is always the goal, I also had the secondary mission of finding some bait for my upcoming shark research trips. The bait of choice for this is of course Barracuda and Jacks.
As soon as we jump in the water, I hear Mark screaming and as I mosey on over, I see a school of about 4 Cudas. I assumed he was pointing them out to me until I heard him scream again and I looked to my left and saw the biggest snapper of my life in about 15 feet of water.
That snapper eluded Mark the whole rest of the day and I continued looking for fish. I shot my first Cuda and started back towards the boat with the fish on my shaft and I saw this nice black grouper just sitting next to a small rock on the sand staring up at me. I called Mark over since there was nothing I could do at that moment and he came over and whiffed on the first shot. I swam back to the boat, dropped off the fish and heard him yelling to get the camera cause he got him on the reload.
We cruised this area for quite some time. I shot a bunch of Cudas. Jimmy shot a bunch of snapper and some others and Mark just kept chasing that elusive 20+lb snapper.
Everything seemed to swim through here...big snappers, big ocean triggers, big yellow jacks, big cudas, nurse sharks of all sizes, one lone bull shark, two turtles (one had a head the size of a basketball) and stingrays (which I hardly ever see).
Shark Bait!
All in all it was an awesome day on the water and the weather forecast lied. I'm sure the other guys have more to add in here.
Awesome pictures and report, thanks!
Mark one stud snapper is worth a thousand mediocre fish 
Hmm.. the bigger cuda looks scaled. Do some shark species you're after prefer it like that?
Also here's some shots showing the new Speardiver camo and how well it blends in here in South Florida...
Mark was only wearing the top piece.
Hmm.. the bigger cuda looks scaled. Do some shark species you're after prefer it like that?
Didn't gut or scale any of the Cudas caught today.
Hint Hint bring me some cudas to eat frank im starving since last week.;)
Like frank said, I spent most of my day being outsmarted by a 30" plus Cubera and then looking for him without success. First 5 mins in the water i missed a very close shot that he seemed to matrix around. I left when frank called me over, got the grouper, and returned to see him slip into a hole, chased him around and saw him flashing in the hole a few more times but held off pulling the trigger before he finally left and never came back. Saw some other epic fish that wouldn't even let me think I had a chance including a monster 20ish lb YJ cruising with a bull shark of all things.
Jimbo, the Chief of the Reef, his bud and I got out off EK on Sunday for some good ol reef spearing in one of our favorite spots. We were expecting bad viz but were surprised to find more than decent viz and flat seas once we got out to the reef.
The boys shot some nice fish including hogs, a big mango snapper, Barry the Barracuda and got taunted by some groupers as usual. I was busy playing with Mark's new camera so I didn't shoot any fish. I'll let the other guys fill in more details.
Fantastic pictures Frank
Candy for the eyes, thanks Frank.
I had forgotten how nice the reefs are on shore dives in south east Florida. Great images. Thanks for sharing.
Cool pics as usual. You guys keep goin all the way down there and shooting barracudas and stuff, you're not eager to get out a little deeper and see whats going on?
Nice dan. I agree. Candy indeed
Cool pics as usual. You guys keep goin all the way down there and shooting barracudas and stuff, you're not eager to get out a little deeper and see whats going on?
I didnt shoot anything out there but pics...Seems like everytime the decision is made to go deeper out there, we end up getting shallower. :crazy:
Beats me. I'm down to go wherever the action is.
you mean it gets shallower going east? Some places do that for quite a while before it drops off.
Was a great day on the water with some bros. Nice viz, amazing weather and seas. Lots of big fish teasing me all day. And enough in the box for dinner.
Cool pics as usual. You guys keep goin all the way down there and shooting barracudas and stuff, you're not eager to get out a little deeper and see whats going on?
A few different reasons why we end up diving shallow.
1) My buddy Jim who's boat we most often use is is a relatively new spearo. Hes starting to get to a point where he has the confidence and skills to dive deeper, but only just recently.
2) Now that hes ready to dive deeper we have absolutely zero good spots past 40'. Finding the shallow spots we have took a lot of exploring of structure/charts and GPSing.
3) The shallow spots we keep visiting are filled with large black groupers and have huge 15lb YJs, big triggers, macs and big cudas coming through all the time etc. Its hard to hunt smart black groupers and huge YJs in shallow water which is why we seldom actually spear them. But its fun trying. So the lack of nice fish isnt so much a lack of nice fish, but a lack of abilities to put holes in said fish. The last 3 times ive hit those spots ive just barely missed big black groupers, a nice cubera, huge YJ's and Macs, etc. Everyone else does the same thing. This causes us to keep going back.
4) Elliot seems to have a weird shoal/shelf at the depths you would expect the next deeper reefs. Once we venture out past the patches we run into a shoal that gradually gets deeper but not reef. We may need to just keep heading out but charts dont identify much structure so we dont really have any idea how the reef works past the 3 mile line and dont want to spend a day wasting time figuring it out. The few times we've ventured out we didnt find shit.
5) We keep planning on diving miami/north elliot where there are more easily locatable wrecks and reefs at medium/deep depths (40-60), but concerns over viz end up making us go south and back to our tried and true spots.
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