My good friend Michael Mattson has been waiting for the word from his boss to bring the 68’ Briggs from Palm Beach to Charleston. We had been hoping to do it earlier in the season but we finally got the word and made a VERY last minute trip. Michael, Mike, Will, Gabe and I piled into a rental car with spearguns and equipment hanging out the back of the trunk tuesday late and pulled out from Palm Beach early afternoon yesterday. We had a short weather window to get home before this nasty NE system hits hard. We had big hopes of freedive spearing in blue water with the option to fish as a secondary thought.
So we headed out on an amazing flat ocean and aimed towards 3000ft. He watched the radar and we chased the birds around looking for tuna. We hoped in on a floating log we passed and i shot a decent dolphin and a triple tail to ensure we had dinner in case nothing else happened. An hour later he marked what he thought was birds on radar but ended up being a huge school of pilot whales. Gabe and Mike and I jumped in and swam with the pilot whales until they got annoyed by us and sounded down deeper than we cared to go. We kept chasing the birds around and found nice weedlines and small fish.
Finally off the south part of Georgia we found birds just blowing up the water and tunas jumping. We put out 5 lines and caught a bull mahi and 3 stud tunas on the first pass. The tunas were moving around fast and it was hard to keep on them. We made another pass and caught some smaller tuna and i dropped back on a dolphin bite and caught a stud cow. Didn’t weigh but somewhere over the 30lb mark.
Now was time to jump in with the spearguns. Mike and Michael saw a decent wahoo right away that was just out of range and then nothing for a while. We swam and did dives to 50ft for over an hour with a few mahi seen and almost a YFT shot but ended with nothing. So we got back in the boat and started fishing again. We caught a few more nice tuna and some small blackfins and yellowfins. Had we gotten there s