Our pilot friend Ian was in town down south in Melbourne and has *just* gotten his sweet Boston Whaler back from the shop with a new engine. He obviously needed our help breaking it in, so we drove down for an epic day of fishing!
We started by leaving the river through the inlet and heading south to where the water should be clearer and we can freedive and shoot fish. When we stopped to check, I jumped in and informed the boys that the water wasn’t very clear at all. One major thing we forgot about was that it was lobster mini season which meant that there were tons of boats around and the water cops were patrolling everyone for safety gear etc. We collectively forgot our dive flag and given the amount of people out, we decided against freediving without one and getting a ticket for it. One amazing thing about driving this far south was that we saw a a few big sea turtles and a few pods of dolphin playing in the waves!
I didn’t get any pictures of the sea turtles, because they were too fast to dive under water! However, Ian’s brother Jared noticed there was a rocket launch this morning! Good ole florida! 🙂
Since freediving close to shore was out, we headed out to the open ocean. As we were cruising, I spotted a big line of weeds. Sometimes there are fish there, so we stopped and jumped in the water! There were no fish at all but the water was super clear and we spent some time trying to touch the sand at the bottom. I did my deepest dive so far, but still didn’t make it to the sand. (next time!) Also… there were jellyfish! The stings weren’t super painful, but they were itchy and annoying. I should have worn my lightweight wetsuit instead of a bikini!
While we were hanging around the boat someone noticed a baby sea turtle in the weeds that had drifted right next to the boat! 😮 ADORABLE!
Since there were no fish, we headed back north towards a buoy that Ian knows about that always has fish at it. I’m sooooo pissed I didn’t bring my little underwater camera because the water was perfectly bathtub clear all the way down to like 50′. We could see the bottom structure as we were driving along at like 40 mph. It was insane. Once at the buoy we jumped in and there was a gigantic school of fish all down the buoy chain that I had fun swimming through. I’ve always wanted to swim through a bait ball and it was every bit as cool as I thought it would be! but no pictures!!!! 🙁 There were also 3 goliath grouper hovering along the bottom. Imagine a grouper, only it’s the size of a VW beetle… I didn’t go anywhere near them!
It was now solidly late afternoon and we’d been out in the boat allll day in the hot sun. We hadn’t caught a single fish, but decided to just head in anyway. I saw something jumping randomly fairly close to the boat so Ian drove over to where it was. Apparently there were Cobia and they’re tasty so Ian jumps into the water with the speargun and immediately jumps back into the boat because there’s a giant bull shark swimming around. He slowly gets back into the water and tries to spear a fish, but it didn’t work out for some reason. Jason’s up on the boat with the only working fishing rod casting and trying to catch one of the cobia. Finally he hooks into something and it feels BIG! Ian is 99% sure he’s hooked into the shark because something keeps peeling line off the reel. Eventually after a few big runs, Jason brings whatever it is up to the boat. It’s *not* the shark… it’s a gigantic kingfish! 😮 At this point Ian is waaaay more interested in actually catching this thing and the boys wrangle it alongside the boat. We don’t have a gaff so Ian shoots it with the speargun from the boat and we use the spear to help get it inside!
This is… probably the biggest fish I’ve ever seen in person!
Not bad for only catching one fish all day long! We ended up with enough meat to almost fill our tiny apartment freezer and the cats were very happy with the scraps!
Overall this was a truly epic day of boating. We got to play in the sun, swim with schools of fish in crystal clear water, and bring home dinner!