JUST IN: New photos from our spear fishing adventure

Spearfishing July 3, 2009

I am fortunate to have found another new way to add excitement to my life. It's not that I am bored or need to blow more time and money, it's that if something sounds fun and Diane does not tie me down I will probably give it a go.

At 6 AM Friday morning Ablert, Steve, George (George has a boat) and I launched from Dickinson Bayou to dive some offshore platforms and do some spearfishing. 2-1/2 hours and 50 miles offshore we reach the BP platform we were looking for but there were all ready 4 other boats there. We could see another platform about 8 miles further south so we took off again. About half way to our second choice we decided our fuel was to low so we turned around and went back to the first platform to find all but 1 boat had left so we tied off to the platform structure, jumped in and headed to the deep.

The surface temperature was in the high 80's. Visibility was fair on top yet below 50 foot deep visibility was not much more than 10-15 feet which made me nervous since we had seen one small shark get caught and barracuda were hanging out looking for an easy meal.

My first catch with a spear gun. This big boy broke my rented spear gun so I was done. I did dive again to watch and see what kind of trouble my crazy friends would get into. I also fished with rod and reel from the boat some.

Steve with a 45 lb ling.

Albert shot some snapper and caught a king mackerel on a rod during a rest break. Albert had the king 3 feet from the boat just ready to gaff him when a big barracuda hit slicing the king in half and scaring the "fish bait" out of Albert. We got the top half of the king on the boat and marvelled at how neatly the barracuda has sliced off his portion. Albert still got a good 10#'s of meat off the king.

Steve with a nice string of snapper

The snapper were all in the 15-25 lbs range. It was a great day in the Gulf of Mexico.