Friday turned out to be a beautiful day on the ocean. Left dock around 7 30. Heading south nothing on first numbers so I turned north towards our favorite hog haven numbers. Water temp was around 78 degrees seas were very calm. Bottom fishing 2 bottle nose dolphin came by to eat our bycatch. So my buddy Bill jumped in to swim with the dolphin. Disney would have charged him $150 for the excursion. He video the dolphin for awhile and we told him to get in the boat we are heading north. Got on our number and made our first splash since October 2016. Making sure we had this breathing underwater thing down we sank down to 100 feet and made our way along the reef. Beautiful reef vis about 50 feet we could see the entire reef. Hogfish came by looking directly at me. My first shot of the year did not meet with the hog. So I reloaded and the next hog came by it was a monster. I took a quick shot and found the soft tissue. He circled around me and pulled my spear. I was yelling to Bill to shoot him but he just looked at my fish swimming away. I reloaded and sprinted in his direction. To my surprise he was laying on a rock so I carefully place my spear to his head. What a monster. I have shot 20 plus pounders and my record was a 22.5 pounder. This guy was huge. I sent him to the top and started heading up to the surface. There was a 8 to 10 foot bull shark checking us out on the was up.
Next dive we found a lobster den and picked up about 5 spinneys and we called it a day.
Mixed bag on bottom fish BSB, vermillion, triggers, white grunts but no grouper. The gags we saw were around 18 inches. We also picked up about 15 huge lionfish. The reefs were not holding a lot of fish.
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