I had yet another incredible dive yesterday! I set off in search of triggerfish with The Spearo Hangout 's Richard Gomes and I'm very happy to say I was successful!
Upon arrival at our destination we got suited up using the brilliant Octacle wetsuit lube, turned on my new GPS and headed into the water to find the wreck, the GPS proved its worth straight away and we were able to anchor the floats right on the wreck 1st try!!
The current was howling by, so we did a few warm up dives to check the float anchor was secure and to get an idea of the wreck overall. Then pretty soon after I loaded up my Freedivers Co. Bulldog 80 and began to look for fish.
The first fish I landed was the above pictured grey mullet, landing in the wreck a shoal of about 20 came in to investigate me and a patiently waited for a large fish from the back of the shoal to come in, lining up my shot I fired and got it straight through the head at a backward angle towards its body. I had stoned the fish but it sank into the wreck with the weight of the spear in it and to my distress the flopper caught on the wreck! Getting low on air I had to let go of my gun and surface without my fish or my gun! 😱 (As a side note here - Always be safe and be prepared to drop anything you have to in order to resurface safely)
I turned to Rich and asked him if he could do a quick dive to secure the gun but as he tried to do a quick breath and dive he got a snorkel full of water 😟 He managed a small short dive and let me know that the gun was safely lodged and the fish was definitely stone dead so not going to swim away with my gun attached. This gave me some relief and I did my recovery on the surface and then took another dive to recover the gun, as I got down I found a conger just grabbing hold of the tail of my fish and starting to tug it back towards his hole, this worked out massively in my favour as the conger had freed the flopper from the wreck so I was able to grab the gun and easily recover the fish and gun together 🙏
Following on from this I switched guns to my 90cm Freediversco Bulldog that is fitted with a reel, much better to have a reel should this situation arise again and it highlights a good reason for using reels in some diving situations.
A few more dives in and I spotted the target species, a lovely triggerfish came out from under the wreck to investigate what was making the scraping sound (it was me scraping my torch against the metal of the wreck) it swam directly at me head on so I waited for it to turn and give me a good shot. Eventually it did and I shot it perfectly, securing the first of the two triggerfish from the day.
The second triggerfish came out later, again to investigate the scraping noise I was making but spooked and tried to dive back under the wreck, I managed to shoot it just as it reached the entry to its hole securing my second triggerfish of the day.
The bream came in to our chum slick we had laid and is the first one I've shot! I had made a mix of smashed up mackerel frames, fish oil and bran and frozen it into blocks and it was super effective for bringing in fish.
I also managed to drag a rogue tent out of the sea, it had blown in from the shore and was heading straight out to sea, as I got to it and grabbed it the damn thing sank, and was pulling very hard towards the bottom, not wanting to drown wrapped up in a tent I didnt dive into/too close to it to cut it up, but this meant towing it was the hardest swim of my life and felt like I was towing a parachute and I was heading against the wind and the current, it took me almost an hour of swimming as hard as I could to cover 150m, but I succeeded and got it out the sea! #oceancleanup
All in all it was an amazing dive, we had 10m viz, I saw lots of different species of fish, even a 5lb cod! (Though typically I saw the cod on a dive where I didnt have my gun in hand and was repositioning the float anchor to another part of the wreck 😂)
Sadly my gopro was back to its usual tricks of freezing and playing up but hopefully there will be a little bit of footage I can recover 🤞
After diving 14+ metres in screaming current on the wreck all day and towing out the tent I was absolutely knackered, but stoked to have yet again set out for a particular species and successfully found them. It was time to head in and start the long drive to get back home for bed 🥱
#ukspearo #freediversco #octacle #spearfishing #wreck #wreckdiving
#strongcurrent #seafood #success #epic #sustainablefishing #caughtnotbought #freediving #triggerfish #bream #mullet #divesafe #KillingIt
8 сен 2024
