Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Diving with PK
PK and I made a couple of more trips since my last report. One day we went to the Fontainebleau area to look for sharks on T-6, there weren’t any. We dove the boxcar and PK got a nice grouper and I found a large flounder. T-5 had permanent fishing boats on it so we skipped that one and came back to the Jeff Boat to round out the dives. The vis wasn’t quite as nice as it had been just a few days earlier, maybe down to 20’ but still pretty good. A giant southern stingray made a flyby flight down the centerline of the Jeff just to show off for us I guess. We have talked about shooting one of those monsters but haven’t yet for a couple of reasons; one would be “Why?” and the other is “Where?” I think it would be quite a ride.
Yesterday (Tues 5 Jan) we made our way through dense fog out to Stage I. We only saw a couple of buoys visually and they were damn close. We slowed a twice for erratic radar returns but they turned out to be birds instead of boats.
The dive at the stage was pretty disappointing. There was excellent vis of 50+ down to the top of the pipes but below that it was 5-8’. PK returned to the boat to save gas, I hung out in the clear water for awhile trying to stalk a couple of cudas but for some reason they were very wary and I didn’t get a shot. The fog cleared about the time we were heading back for some inshore diving and we closed out our float-plan with Seatow. We hit the Strength and found the great vis we had enjoyed in previous days inshore was gone and it was down to 15’ at best. PK did come up with one grouper and some story about a shot in the dark. From there we did one of the inshore spans and somehow two of those baby AJ’s we have been seeing for months had finally put on some length. We each took one that made the requisite 30”s. I did another dive on the offshore twin barge but it was pretty desolate with only bunches of snapper and no other desirable sport-fish.
PK goes back to the praries of Canada and their -20 degree highs in a couple of days. I might go visit but not til it warms to 80.
