West Coast Offshore

My family went down Friday to our house on Palm Island. Plans for the weekend were to go offshore both saturday and sunday and do some diving and fishing. Friday evening I got a 28" snook within a few minutes and then had to start rigging the rods for saturday. The weather forecast for both days was for 2 ft seas, uhhh yeah right! They ended up being 2-4ft seas and the occasional 5 ft wave that made the trip out on both days rough. On saturday my father and I headed out 20 miles and on a very large swiss cheese bottom area we released about 30-40 red's and a variety of a flounder, grunts, and other things. On that area I got a 22 1/2" Red and my dad got a 26" and a 25" Red which were pigs compared to mine. Then we headed out to a spot at 23 miles in 81 ft. of water and anchored again. All that seemed to be there were tons of juvenille reds. We also picked up 4 keeper lane snapper and 2 large grunts between the two spots. While at the 23 mile spot I noticed a few remoras hangin around and not after long a 5' Tiger shark popped up behind the boat. I didn't have anything ready for a shark so I took my pitch rod with 40lb mono leader and tossed him half a blue runner. He swallowed it and didn't fight at all at first. Got it right to the boat and my dad was gonna bring it in until I said I don't want to bring in a fresh shark since all he will do is flop around. So it finally started fighting and was fighting like a champ for just a 5' shark. After about 5 minutes he finally got through the leader and I lost the Tiger. It was still fun just having the chance to fight a tiger shark. The seas started getting rougher so we had to call it and made the run back to the dock. On Sunday my sister joined us and we went out 22 miles to Boxcar Reef. It's the first time I've ever dove down at our island house and first solo dive in more than 40ft of water. The visiblity was about 20' and I had a bottom time in 75' about 35 mins. As soon as I got to the bottom I was surrounded by 30-40 lb AJ's and I was about to pull the trigger on my speargun when I remembered that the AJ season was closed early by whoever manages those laws. So I didn't feel like getting fined today so I moved on and checked out a lot of the boxcars and other wreckage. There were 30 lb cuda's everywhere as well as hundreds of 15 lb jack crevelle and thousands of mangos sitting on the boxcars. I only saw 3 grouper and they were between 18" and 10". At one point I was caught between two 350lb goliaths that had 2" bait going 10' every way of them and I was stuck between em' in all that bait. When I was peeking below a boxcar looking for a grouper to shoot I had a goliath sneak up behind me and when I turned around I was amazed at the size of this one. It's the biggest goliath I've ever seen while diving and had to have been 600lbs based on it's gut and shear size. I felt smaller than I've ever felt when I was sitting there. To try and scare it off so the mango's would come out again I poked it with my speargun on it's side and I freaked out when it grunted. I didn't know they grunt until that happened. I was probably 50' away within 10 seconds of that thing going ballistic on me cus' I had no idea that when they grunt it sounds like the sonic boom of a space shuttle right next to you. My dad wouldn't let me take a stringer down for my fish so he said I would of had to bring up something immedietly if I shot it. So I was running out of time and started focusing on shooting a big mangrove snapper. But with the 3 goliaths around now all the mangroves got skiddish so I went up empty handed. All in all it was my #1 artifical reef dive I've ever had and the #2 overall just behind Molassas in the Keys. My father and sister dove after me and I gotta say I really like solo diving more than being with a buddy cus I don't have to watch out for some other person and go up when that person runs out of air since I swim fast and don't breathe as much as the rest of my family. Next time I go down in a few weeks hopefully I'll have a shark report. This might sound weird but I heard from a guy at a dive shop down there that there were still a few big hammers hangin out in boca still as well as quite a few tarpon. Everything this year except the cobia down there has been like a month late this year. Only a few pics were taken and that was at the dock and my mom took them and she doesn't know how to use my camera so the fish after being frozen look really small. My dad is leaving Tuesday and I know has caught a few big redfish off the dock and will probably end up with a few snook and another red or two and a few grouper off the dock by the time he leaves tomorrow.