5/17 Freedive fantasy

[100days-a-year]

Left late at 7:15 to check out some new stuff and try the HG area.New stuff was bait stops only.Get to HG and 6 boats on the big ledge,1 onn a couple of others leaves me 10 lttle guys to pick from ,I picked the on with 3-5# sheephead and 3-8# mangoes ,new guy is shooting as I hear the click of his trigger 3 times,no real fish .I hip shoot a mango and get him 5#.Next divesite we are fishing up surface interval and bubble watcher hooks a huge fish which turns out to be a foul hooked Genuine of 20# he is frantically pumping and winding the fish back to the boat against the full moon tide which is running .8 kts.As he makes his last pull the fish floats up as his air bladder is full.Guy jerks the hook out and a 20# snapper starts floating away,I immediately jump in wearing a polartec and booties.I get back to the fish and tread water and hold his head outta the water.Crew throws me a wayback line and tows me back to the boat .Fish of the day were those 2 snapper and a true 4.5# Lane snapper.WT was 78 on top 71-74 on the bottom.Vis was 30' or less all day.HG is heavily overfished it seems ,had no less than 12 boats around us with a few jerkoffs coming awful close to get #s

[1bumknee]

We headed out Mayport about the same time. Went to RL to do a little king fishing, but all we caught were 5 small reef sharks and a turtle. About noon we pulled in the lines and went to a barge in HH but there were already hunters on it. Tried to find some culverts nearby but after getting suited up the anchor had drug off the spot. Did'nt think to check the gps before heading down to the surface of the moon (rookie error won't happen again). So back to RL to a spot we marked while trolling. We had found a real nice section of live bottom with a good 5 - 8 foot ledge. I have only dove one other section of live bottom off Jax and the profile was only a foot or two so I was pretty excited. For the first 5 min I did'nt see shit, but then a few good size mangos came into view. Passed on them and kept going, figured I would get them on the way back. A few minutes later I saw a huge gag but he saw me first and was already heading out to the sand. Decided to go up a little and see if he came back, but the vis was so bad I would have never saw him. So back down to get a look under the ledge where I thought he came from and there were all his little friends. Picked off one and the others were gone. Was already getting low on air so I called it a day. Came back in around 2 with a 10# gag for dinner. May sound like a weak day to you guys but it was the first time I had been in the water since August. Finally got to load up on my Nitrogen.

[greyface]

Hey, at least you guys got out. I had to stay in front of the calculator & blueprints all day.:mad: