My Fishing Adventures
By Christopher Sprague Jr. Angler-Team Tuppens, Contributing Writer
Hello Anglers, I hope you all have been fishing and been on the water lately. Recently I was able to go spearfishing and freediving with my friend from school. My friend Maxim and his dad are experienced and have been spearfishing for quite some time. They gave me a lesson about freediving in deeper waters and some safety guidance, along with a simple procedure and a plan of what we were going to do. We went to this spot that was around 50 feet deep. This was just barely out of my comfort zone since it has been a few months from when I went freediving in the Keys. We got to our spot and hopped in the water. Immediately the water surrounded us, and it was so cold, it was hard to put my face in the water. I also only have a wetsuit top, so my legs were freezing which made diving a little harder. We kept looking around for the rocks but could only find hard bottom nothing else, so we reset 3 times before finding something we liked. We never found the rock; however, we did find amberjacks and some yellow jacks. My job was to be the buoy holder this time, so I was not able to spear anything. The first few shots Max and his dad took missed, but then Max saw some sheepshead that he wanted to spear. He went down and suddenly a huge amberjack swam up right next to him, so he slowly moved his gun and shot. It hit the amberjack right through the gill and Max quickly got it to the surface. The fish was struggling a lot and it was extremely hard to get it onto the boat. We eventually had to grab the gaff and just hook the fish on and pull it up to the boat. Immediately sharks surrounded us, and we had to get out. We decided to call it a day, but Max was extremely happy since this was the biggest fish he had ever speared. We guessed it to be around 35 pounds. We had an amazing day and will be spearfishing again soon since it was so much fun!