Last Saturday I went diving with Trish Dorn and Oscar Planas on "Cattitude". Trish and I were diving off of Hillsboro Beach in 100 FSW when I came across this El Capitan and a nice size female hogfish. I hunted and shot the male as witnessed by the attached photo. It was a long shot that barely found it's mark. Trish shot the female and was almost immediately "buzzed" by to big Bull Sharks. We ended our dive without incident.
Between the three of us, we took six keeper lobster.
The water was clear (60'-70'), cold (72 degrees) with a strong current running to the south. The air temp. that day was in the low 60's so the water felt warm. The wind was coming out of the NW in the early morning and clocked to NE by mid-day, which caused a confused sea as we returned to Boca Inlet.

"Thank you" to Trish Dorn for the pictures.

Dive Safe,

Steve Schoepp

Mid-week holidays take their toll on American productivity. This past 4th of July Holiday was no exception. My client meeting had postponed, the phone was dead and my email current. I was in workday limbo. Then the call came from my friend Oscar Planas, “Hey Man, let’s go diving!”

We cleared the rocks at Boca Inlet about 11:00 am. Onboard Oscar’s boat “Aqui Esta” ("Here It Is" in Spanish), Oscar drove, while his son Anthony and I enjoyed the ride. Anthony is 12 years old, very interested in diving and hopes to be certified this summer. The Ocean was flat has we headed north to dive the patch reefs off Spanish River Park.

Since we like to drift dive and there was only two of us, we would be diving one-up-one-down. I chose to dive the patch from 80’ to 100’ FSW to checkout the lobster and hunt fish. When I rolled in, I could see that visibility was poor. The tide was pumping hard to the north. The sea fans and gorgonians were all bent in the direction of the current. It was what we call a "Peter Pan Dive" - you fly through the water. Back at the surface, Oscar said the flag was pulling me so hard that when I would stop, it would dip underwater.

On my first dive, the reef was alive but I did not spear a fish. A big loggerhead turtle resting on the bottom, a dozen small Hogfish, four barely legal Mutton Snapper and a couple of small Gag Grouper. There was nothing on the 100’ ledge. However, Lobster seemed to be in every crack and crevice in the 80’-85’ patch. The water temp was a comfortable 80 degrees.

Oscar dove the same profile just to the north. He speared a nice Hogfish in the deep patch. The current was still ripping as he made his way into the shallows. He crossed over the top of the reef and found a ledge that dropped from 45’ to 60’ where he shot a second nice Hogfish. When he came up, he told me that there were deep under-cuts on the ledge and that the area looked very “fishy”. Since my deep dive was not productive, I decided to start my next dive on that ledge.

We circled back to the marks and I dropped in the ledge. As I descended, I had one band loaded on my Custom Biller 56 when cruising out of the gloom came a big Cobia! My first instinct was to take a quick, one band shot at the body. Experience tells me that an unprepared, poor shot on a fish like this usually results in lost fish, lost gear and “the one that got away” stories back on the boat. As the fish made a big arc back in my direction I started to load the second band when a nurse shark about four feet long became interested in my kneecap. He kept coming so butted him with my spear gun. He moved away and joined the Cobia, still keeping his distance in a slow arc toward me.

I loaded the second band and tried to take a bead on the Cobia, but the Nurse Shark was swimming so close to the Cobia it was blocking my shot. They began to swim away when the shark broke left, giving me a clear headshot on the Cobia. From about ten feet away, the free-shaft arrow struck the Cobia behind the left eye and exited slightly forward on the opposite side. A clean shot, but not an instant kill. The mortally wounded fish swam over the ledge and down to the 60’ sand bottom. I was in hot pursuit swimming from rock to rock trying to get my hands on the spear. The Cobia was bouncing off of the bottom and rocks trying to dislodge the spear. Several times I would almost grab the end and he would bolt away from me. He was bleeding profusely and getting weaker by the moment. I had one wary eye out for sharks, which were surely closing in on the blood trail.

Finally, I got hold of the spear and guided his escape frenzy to the bottom, jammed the other end of the spear into the sand and came down the shaft to pin the fish to the sea floor. This fish has heart and fought for all he was worth. He gave me two hard body slams that felt like someone punching my gut and almost knocked the regulator out of my mouth. I jammed the stringer through his eyes and inflated the lift bag I had attached to the stringer during the chase. He popped to the surface where Oscar pulled him very much alive into the boat.

I was out of breath and had a headache. I looked at my console and saw that I was at 60’ and had sucked down 1800 pounds of air in the 13 minutes I had been on the bottom! Time flies when your having fun.

I began reeling the float line back to the surface. When I got to my safety stop, with the boat above me, I see Oscar’s arm shaking wildly in the water trying to hand back my spear. I was done and had no intention of going back down. When I got on the boat, I realized that the fish had somehow snapped off the end of my shaft at the first band-slot and was of no use anyway.

In the end, our not-so productive workday became a very productive dive day. Oscar shot two nice Hogfish. My Cobia was 51 inches long and weighed 37 pounds. We weighed the fish on Oscar’s bathroom scale since the fish scale we had only went to 25 pounds. It is the third and the largest Cobia I have ever shot. What a great day. On the way home it occurred to me, “Gee, only 3 more Cobia and I’ll catch-up to Sheri Daye”