Tuesday, June 7, 2016

May 12, 2016 Snorkeling and spearfishing

Today we took the dinghy to check out the reefs on the “outside” of the islands.  The side towards the Exuma Sound was deeper.  We found a coral reef and tried to fish from the boat.  I kept catching my hook on the coral.  I was using the leader that our friend, Gloria, had made for us.  I didn’t want to loose it, so I decided to snorkel away from the side Dave was fishing.  It didn’t take me long to figure out we needed to move the boat closer to the schools of fish near a wall on the reef.  Then Dave could spear fish.  After we moved the boat, he took the spear and stayed near the dinghy.  You want to get the fish into the dinghy as soon as possible to avoid a barracuda or shark from trying to take it away from you :(  We hadn’t seen any sharks yet.  And the barracuda were small, only about 2-3 feet long.  And they weren’t very curious. 
our boat in beautiful water
Gloria's jig on a steel leader

I enjoyed snorkeling the reef.  There were more fish here than we saw in the Land and Sea park a few weeks ago.  There was a large ray with a couple remoras following it.  After awhile, I decided to go back to the dinghy and wait for Dave.  As soon as I got in the boat, he started to bring fish up on his spear.  He had been trying to get larger fish that were deeper under rock shelves.  He spent a lot of time practicing diving, holding his breath, and getting a decent shot at the fish.  Once he saw me back at the dinghy, he went for those that were more plentiful.  He ended up spearing 4 grunts and 2 squirrel fish.  By the end of the day, his 3 pronged spear was pretzeled and dull from hitting a lot of rocks when he missed the fish. .  It was now after 3:00 and the sun wasn’t as high, making it harder to see under water.  So we called it a day.  On our way back to our boat, we noticed there was another boat anchored here, but not too close to us.  It was a Bertram, motorized trawler type of boat.  They could get into a more shallow area than we could, so they were to the east of us on the other side of a bank of rocks.
spear fishing
grunt and squirrel fish

Dave cleaned the fish on our stern again.  He wasn’t at it too long when our neighbor came over in his fishing boat to introduce himself.  His nickname was Cracky and he was here with his wife, Tania.  They were from Nassau and had been coming to this spot for a bout 15 years.  They can make it here in about 3 hours.  After watching Dave for awhile, he left and came back with a fish scaler.  We used to have one, not sure why we didn’t bring one.  Cracky invited Dave to go fishing in the morning for mahi off shore a ways.  Of course, Dave jumped at the chance.
 
click for video of Dave cleaning fish and feeding the remora







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