Southeast Florida dive boats

[wspalding]

We did our first dive Saturday at the Hole in the Wall on the deep ledge; you can do a high altitude flyby at 110 or so but the ledge itself is at about 120 and goes down to 130-140. I hit 127 trying to knock off some lionfish. The next two were on the Wreck Trek; if you get the nosebleed seat on the davit over the Bonaire's fantail you can hang at 70 and sip your air. It's 90 in the sand where the action is. I stay up high to conserve my bottom time; on the second dive I stayed up there as we only had three lemons and a nurse shark. On the third I made the call towards the end to push it and at least snap some lemon shark pics in the sand, which pushed me into deco. I would not have made that call if I wasn't fat on gas; I had a steel 120 pumped to 3800 psi with a 35% nitrox mix and had 2500 psi left when I dropped to the sand. I left bottom with over 2000 and was back on the boat with 1000 after a 35-minute ascent.

Honestly, if you just want to see lemon sharks, if we have an aggregation as good as we had this year any of the other boats shouldn't have an issue finding some for you without baiting.


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I've seen lots of sharks, including lemons, mostly in Jupiter. We got a lemon shark fly by my last trip.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Dang it, Halcyon!

Due to personal and work reasons, I completely missed the lemon migration this year. Glad it was good but now I feel lemon envy . . .

The lemons appeared to hang around longer than usual; I think from the reports they had some stragglers into the end of April on the Lemon Drop. When I was on Narcosis at the time we saw six there, one of which performed the public service of gleefully swiping a lionfish I had dropped on the bottom while trying to clear my short spear for another victim. There are still some sightings of residents. Back in January and February the non-baited ops had no issues finding groups of them.

The funny thing is I found the shark showing on Saturday disappointing - if it were just lemons and bulls (the latter of which I had 5-6 sightings of on the Hole in the Wall, all staying deep and not approaching me), I could just as easily go on another dive. We were gunning for the tigers, which didn't show even after an estimated two hours of having bait in the water. What we got were three lemons and a nurse shark, the former of which appear to be local residents and not part of the migration. Probably my best shark pic of the day was before we got anywhere near the Bonaire and the bait; I saw a smallish lemon cruising on the bottom near the Zion Train and dived down on it for a shoot-and-scoot. The other contender was a snapshot of two swimming practically on top of each other near the bait.